




li 1 1 III I l\l AT i O N AL LI Mfilli 
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Book i^ O 
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COI'VKICWIT DEPOSIT. 



National 
Library of Kindergarten Literature 

Exiited by 
National Kindergarten Association 

Volume 1 



Sketches of FroebePs 
Life and Times 

WITH INTRODUCTION 
BY THE 

Hon. P:1p! CLAXTON 

United States Commissioner of Education 



c^e 



1914 
MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY 

Springfield, Massachusetts 



LB637 



5s 



Copyright, 1914, 
By Milton Bradley Co. 



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7U I. 



CONTENTS 



PACK 



Introduction P, p, Qaxton vii 

Education: Froebel, John Jay Chapman 1 
From "Causes and Consequences." 

In Keilhau, Georg Ebers 28 

From "The Story of my Life." 

Infant Gardens, . . . James L. Hughes 124 

From " Dickens as an Educator." 

Girlhood Days at Keilhau, 

Henrietta Schrader, Berlin 147 
Translated by Bertha Hofer Hcgner 
Edited by Amalic Hofer Jerome, and 
reprinted from Kindergarten Magazine 
l)y her permission. 

Bibliography, I95 



INTRODUCTION 

SEEK ye first the Kingdom of God." 
— On his first Monday morning in 
school, the boy Friedrich Froebel 
heard the children, all standing, repeat 
these words. They were the words 
of the text of the sermon to which the children 
had listened on Sunday. Every morning of the 
week they were repeated over and over again, 
by individual children and by the whole group, 
until they made an impression upon him," as 
none had ever done before and none had ever 
done after." Writing of this event forty years 
later, he says, "Perhaps even then, the simple 
boy heard and felt that these words would be 
the foundation and the salvation of his life, 
bringing to him that conviction which was to 
become later on to the working, striving man, 
a source of incomparable courage, of unflinching, 
ever-ready, and cheerful self-sacrifice. In short, 
my introduction into that school was my birth 
into the higher, spiritual life." He who would 
understand Froebel's life and philosophy of 
education must bear this statement in mind, 



vili INTRODUCTION 

and remember that for Froebel, the Kingdom 
of God meant the realization of the divine 
spirit in the individual man and woman, and 
of the divine order in human society. 

No other educator has realized so fully the 
unity of nature, man, and God. No other has 
seen more clearly the vision of redeemed hu- 
manity, living in harmony with nature, governed 
by love, and rejoicing in ever-progressing crea- 
tive work. No other has ever understood better 
that the Kingdom of God is the Kingdom of 
love, of light, of life, of truth, and of intelligent, 
skillful, effective service. For him, all roads 
lead to God. For him, God is the all-pervading, 
creative spirit of the Universe. The soul of 
man is a part of the divine essence. The edu- 
cation of man consists in the unfolding and 
revelation of this divine essence, through well- 
guided, spontaneous, creative activity. God 
is a creator, and man, made in his image, is a 
creator also. Education does not consist alone 
or chiefly in instruction or training, but rather — 
development and growth. The teacher is there- 
fore a gardener, watching patiently and intelli- 
gently for the budding points of the soul, the 
nascent stages of interest, supplying suitable 
environment — food, light, and air — and pro- 
tecting the child against those who, in their 
ignorance and ruthless zeal, would hamper and 
restrain, dwarf and warp, or unduly stimulate 



INTRODUCTION ix 

the child by untimely prescription. The school 
is a garden in which children live and grow 
through healthy, happy, vigorous, active child- 
hood, to strong purposeful manhood. Man, 
the child, is an active animal, a struggler alive 
and happy only in activity. 

With a full understanding of the importance 
of spontaneous activity and the dangers of 
narrow prescription, Froebel avoided the dangers 
and absurdities of leaving the child, without 
guidance, to the unlicensed freedom of the 
savage. "The development of the child's inner 
being must be on the one hand spontaneous, 
and, on the other, in accord with the universal 
trend of life." To know, interpret, and apply 
the trend of life in guiding the spontaneous 
activities of the child, is a task worthy the 
understanding and skill of the wisest and best. 
"Would there might be for the human being, 
for my child, even from its first advent into the 
world, a correct comprehension of its being, a 
suitable fostering and management, an education 
truly leading to the all-sided attainment of its 
destiny." That there might be such loving 
fostering, such intelligent leading, he plead 
"that we live with our children, live for them, 
and give our lives to them." 

And this is not mere sentiment, it is the 
highest statesmanship and the truest principle 
of economics. Charles Dickens, the advocate 



X INTRODUCTION 

of the kindergarten in England, was right when 
he declared, "there would be fewer sullen, 
quarrelsome, dull-witted men and women, if 
there were fewer children starved and fed im- 
properly in heart and brain. Society can be 
improved only by making men and women 
better by wholesome education in childhood 
and infancy." When this principle is fully 
recognized in our democracy there will be a new 
perspective in legislation and a new adjustment 
of the agencies of government. 

It has been said that Froebel discovered 
infancy as the most important part of the life 
of the individual and its proper treatment as 
the most important problem in education. 
Truly a great discovery, and probably his most 
important contribution to education and his 
surest guarantee of immortality. Out of this 
discovery came the kindergarten which in some 
form must continue as an integral part of the 
world's system of education. Much of the 
program of the kindergarten grows out of the 
fact that the child cannot be developed alone, 
in contact only with nature, or even in contact 
with older people. The child is a social being 
and must have the society of other children. 
This social contact is most useful in play and 
co-operative work — a principle too often for- 
gotten even by scientific students of the child 
and its education. "We are not wholesome 



INTRODUCTION » 

unless we are self-forgetting" and we are most 
self-forgetting in spontaneous social activity. 
Life is the child's greatest teacher and it can- 
not teach its best lessons unless it be full and 
varied. 

"Turning the attention upon selfish ends, no 
matter how remote or momentary, hurts the 
organization, contracts the intellect, dries up 
the emotions, and is felt as unhappiness. Turn- 
ing the attention toward public ends benefits 
the organism, enlarges the intellect, and is felt 
as happiness." The social life of the kinder- 
garten effectively directs the attention of the 
child toward unselfish ends. 

Froebel's philosophy of education did not end 
with the development of the individual child, 
however important that may be. It includes 
the race. "Humanity is not fixed and sta- 
tionary, but is steadily and progressively 
growing, in a state of ever-living development, 
ever ascending from one stage of culture to 
another, its goal partaking of the infinite and 
eternal." The welfare and happiness of the 
race is not less important than the welfare and 
happiness of the individual. The education of 
each must have regard to that of the other. 

The value of the vocational and practical in 
education was understood by Froebel, and he is 
not the least among the forces that have given 
modern education its industrial tendency. But 



xii INTRODUCTION 

his philosophy comprehends also the life that 
cannot live by bread alone. In a time when 
there is danger of over-emphasis on the trade 
school and narrow preparation for vocational 
efficiency alone, there is need that we refresh 
ourselves with the call of his high aim "to make 
the man whose feet shall stand on God's earth, 
rooted fast in nature, while his head towers up 
to heaven and reads its secrets with steady gaze, 
whose heart shall embrace both earth and 
heaven, shall enjoy the life of earth and nature 
with all its wealth of form and at the same time 
shall recognize the purity and peace of heaven, 
that unites in its love, God's earth with God's 
heaven." 

To this end the publication of the matter 
making up the four sections of this book will 
render valuable service. Henrietta Schrader's 
"Girlhood Days at Keilhau," and Georg 
Ebers' recollections of his school days at Froe- 
bel's school, give the personal touch, while the 
selections from Dickens and Chapman present 
Froebel's philosophy of education from different 
points of view. 

P. P. CLAXTON. 

Washington, D.C., January 17, 1914. 



PREFACE 

THIS volume is the first of a series 
which the National Kindergarten 
Association has undertaken to pre- 
pare for the use of teachers and 
students. 
During the three quarters of a century which 
spans the life of the kindergarten, book after 
book has made its appearance, its pages filled 
with descriptions and interpretations of this or 
that aspect of Froebel's system of education, and 
we are grateful for the steady output of helpful 
and attractive literature. More numerous, how- 
ever, than the entire books on the subject are the 
significant single essays and sketches and studies 
of kindergarten philosophy and practice which 
have been contributed from time to time by 
well known educators and writers, and which 
have been published in educational magazines 
or records or reports. 

Scattered thus over a wide range of space and 
time, this valuable literary material is inaccess- 
ible except to those who live within reach of the 
large city and university libraries. It is there- 
fore the purpose of the National Kindergarten 
Association to gather such material into per- 



xiv PREFACE 

manent and convenient form and offer it to the 
public. Such articles as have been selected have 
abiding value and therefore are never out of 
season. 

The subsequent volumes of the series will deal 
with the Program or Course of Study in the 
Kindergarten: Kindergarten Philosophy and 
Psychology: The Kindergarten and Society: 
Kindergarten and the Arts: Games: Excur- 
sions: Gardening, and other related topics. 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

Reprinted by permission from Causes and Consequences, by John 
Jay Chapman. (Mofifat, Yard & Co., Publishers.) 

I HAVE two boys, aged seven and four. 
They required a governess and I got one. 
After a couple of months, during which 
the usual experiences in the training of 
young children were gone through, I discovered 
that it was I who was being educated. My 
mind was being swayed and drawn to a point of 
view. I was in contact with a method so pro- 
found that it seemed as if I were dealing with, 
or rather being dealt with by, the forces of nature. 
I was in the presence of great genius. What was 
it? The text-book on Froebel by Hughes in the 
International Series on Education made the 
matter clear. 

Froebel was an experimental psychologist 
who used the terms of the German philosophy 
of his day. But the facts of life, the thing he was 
studying, was never for a moment absent from 
his mind. He lived in an age when the ideas of 
evolution were in the air, and before they had 
received their conclusive proof by being applied 
to morphology. 



2 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

This application has for a time killed philoso- 
phy, for it has identified the new ideas with the 
physical sciences, and led men to study the 
human mind in psychology and from without, 
whereas the mind and its laws can, in the 
nature of things, be studied only through intro- 
spection. Froebel had a scientific intellect of 
the very first caliber; he had the conception of 
flux, of change, of evolution, to start with; and 
he took up introspectively the study of the laws 
of the human mind, choosing that province of 
the universe where they are most visibly and 
typically exposed, — the mind of the growing 
child. 

The "laws" which he states are little more 
than a description of the phenomena that he 
observed. They are statements of the results of 
his experiments, and the language he employs 
can be translated to suit the education of almost 
any one. His attention was so concentrated 
upon fact that his terminology does not mislead. 
It can be translated into the language of meta- 
physics, of Christian theology, or of modern 
science, and it remains incorruptibly coherent. 

His method of study was the only method 
which can obtain results in philosophy, self-study 
unconsciously carried on. He observed the child, 
and guessed at what was going on in its mind by 
a comparison with what he knew of himself. 
He was anxious to train young children intelli- 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 3 

gently, and he found it necessary to describe 
and formulate his knowledge of the operation of 
their minds. It turns out that he made a state- 
ment of the universe more comprehensive, a 
philosophy more universal, than any other of 
which we have any record. 

But this is not the most important thing he 
did. He devised a method based upon his 
experiments and set agoing the kindergarten 
upon its course in conquest of the world. If it 
had not been for this, he might never have been 
heard of, for the world has small use for systems 
of philosophy, however profound, expressed in 
terms which have been superseded and are 
become inexpressive. But Froebel started a 
practice. He showed the way. He put in the 
hands of persons to whom his philosophy must 
ever remain a mystery, the means of working 
out those practical ends for which that philoso- 
phy was designed. 

The greatness of Froebel lies in this, that he 
saw the essential. What sort of an animal is 
man? asks the morphologist, for he is beginning 
to reach this point in his studies; and before he 
has asked it, Froebel has answered him. 

"Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast 
thou ordained strength." 

It may be said at once that the substance of 
everything Froebel says was known before. 
Solomon and Orpheus, Marcus Aurelius, Emer- 



4 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

son, and all of us have known it. Otherwise 
Froebel would be unimportant. It is his correla- 
tion and his formulation of the main facts about 
human life that make him important. It is as a 
summary of wisdom, as a focus of idea, as a lens 
through which the rest of the ideas in the world 
can be viewed, that he is great. 

The laws he discovered may be stated in a 
paragraph. The child is a growing organism. 
It is a unity. It develops through creative 
activity. It is benefited by contact with other 
children and is happy in proportion as it is 
unselfishly employed. 

Let us assume for a moment that these things 
are true, that they are the most important 
truths about the child ; and let us see how they 
must affect our views of life, of politics, sociology, 
art, religion, conduct. There is of course no 
moment at which the child ceases to be a child. 
The laws of its growth and being are not at any 
discoverable time superseded by any new laws, 
Man as a creature, as an organism, has here by 
Froebel, and for the first time in history, been 
ingenuously studied, and the main laws of him 
noted. With the discovery that he is a unity, 
there vanishes every classification of science 
made since the days of Aristotle. They are 
convenient dogmas, thumb rule distinctions, 
useful as aids in the further pushing of our 
studies into the workings of this unity. Take 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 5 

up now a book of political economy, a poem, a 
history: this thought of Froebel's runs through 
it like quicksilver. The scheme of thought of 
the writer is by it dissolved at once into human 
elements. You find you are studying the opera- 
tion of the mind of some one, whom you picture 
to yourself as a man, as a unit; you are inter- 
preting this by your own experience. It is all 
psychology, you are pushing your analysis. The 
universe is receiving its interpretation through 
you yourself. We are thus brought to the point 
of view of the mystic, as the only conceivable 
point of view. 

"That the organism develops by creative 
activity," This might have come as a deduction 
from Darwin. It is an expression in metaphys- 
ical language of the "struggle for life." Froebel 
discovered it independently. The consequences 
of a belief in it are so tremendous, that no man 
who is not prepared to spend the rest of his life 
completely dominated by the idea, ought even 
to pause to consider it. 

Your capacities, your beliefs, your develop- 
ment, your spiritual existence, are the result of 
what you do. Active creation of some sort, 
occupation which takes your entire attention 
and calls upon you, merely incidentally and as a 
matter of course, for thought, resource, individ- 
ual or original force; this will develop you and 
nothing else will. 



6 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

The connection between this thought and the 
previous one is apparent. It is only by such 
creative activity that the organism as a unit 
gets into play. If you set a man copying or 
memorizing, you have occupied only a fraction 
of him. It you set him to making something, 
the minute he begins, his attention is concen- 
trated. Willy nilly he is trying to make some- 
thing significant, he is endeavoring to express 
himself, the forces and powers within him begin 
coming to his succor, offering aid and suggestion. 
Before he knows it, his whole being is in opera- 
tion. The result is a statement of some sort, 
and in the process of making it the creature has 
developed. But when you say "significant" 
you have already implied the existence of other 
organisms. He is not expressing himself only, 
he is expressing them all, and here comes Froebel 
with his third great discovery, that it is by con- 
stant personal intercourse with others that the 
power to express is gained. And on top of this 
comes the last law, so closely related to the third 
as to be merely a new view of it, but discovered 
by experiment, tested by practice, announced 
empirically and as a fact, that the child is un- 
selfish and only really happy when at work 
creatively and for the use and behoof of others. 

This conclusion throws back its rays over the 
course of the argument, and we are compelled 
to see, what we have already known, that 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 1 

unselfishness and intellectual development are 
one and the same thing, that there is no failure 
of intellect which cannot be expressed in terms 
of selfishness, and no selfishness that cannot be 
expressed as intellectual shortcoming. Crim- 
inology has reached the same point by another 
route. 

The matter is really very simple, for anything 
self-regardant means a return of the organism 
upon itself, a stepping on your own toes, and 
brings self-consciousness, discomfort, pain. Self- 
sacrifice on the other hand brings fulfillment. 
The self-sacrifice is always illusory, and the 
development real. This becomes frightfully 
apparent in ingenuous and unhappy love affairs, 
for the organism robbed of fulfillment returns 
upon itself. 

It makes little difference what province of 
thought we begin with in applying these views 
to the world. They give results like a table of 
logarithms. They do more than this, they 
unravel the most complex situations, they give 
the key to conduct and put a compass in the 
hands of progress. They explain history, they 
support religion, they justify instinct, they 
interpret character. They give the formula for 
doing consciously what mankind has been doing 
unconsciously in so far as it has been doing what 
any one of us in his soul approves of or cares to 
imitate. 



8 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

Let us take up the most obvious deductions. 
If people develop according to their activities, 
their opinions will be a mere reflex of their 
conduct. What they see in the world comes out 
of what they do in the world. Here in a mere 
niche of Froebel we find the whole of Emerson. 

The power and permanence of Sainte-Beuve 
are due to his having applied this theory to the 
interpretation of literature. He is not content 
till he has seen the relation between the conduct 
and the opinions, the conduct and the art of a 
character. 

Or take Emerson himself, why was it that 
being so much he was not more? How came it 
that after his magnificent prologue in the Phi 
Beta Kappa address, which is like the opening of 
a symphony, he relapsed into iteration and 
brilliant but momentary visions of his own 
horizon? He kept repeating his theme till he 
piped himself into fragmentary inconsequence. 
The reason is that he had learned all he knew 
before he retired to Concord and contemplation. 
Active life would have made him blossom annu- 
ally and last like Gladstone. 

Or take Goethe: all that is questionable in 
him results from his violation of two of Froebel's 
laws of psychology. He fixed his attention upon 
self-development and thereby gradually ossified. 
Every moment of egotism was an intellectual 
loss. His contact with people, meanwhile. 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 9 

became more and more formal as he grew older, 
and his work more and more inexpressive. 

Give me a man's beliefs, and I will give you 
his occupation. What has happened to that 
radical that he seems to have become so moder- 
ate and reasonable? You find that for six 
months he has been clerk to the Civil Service 
Reform Club. Why is the mystical poetry of 
this intellectual man as vacant as the fashion 
print he edits for his daily bread? His employ- 
ment has tracked his mind to these unearthly 
regions. He is dead here too. 

There is no such thing as independent belief, 
based on evidence and reflection. The thing we 
call belief is a mere record left by conduct. If 
you sincerely go through the regimen of Loyola's 
manual, you will come out a Jesuit. You can no 
more resist it than you can resist the operation 
of ether. This man is an optimist. It means 
that he has struggled. That man is a pessimist. 
It means that he has shirked. Here is one who 
has been in touch with all movements for good 
during a dismal era of corruption, and yet he 
has no faith. It means that the whole of him 
has not been enlisted. His conscience has 
drawn him forward. It is not enough. There 
is compromise in him. He is not an absolute 
fighter. 

Here is the most excellent gentleman in 
America, an old idealist untouchably transcen- 



10 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

dental, an educated man. To your amazement 
he thinks that it is occasionally necessary to 
subsidize the powers of evil. He was bred a 
banker. 

Here is a village schoolma'am who from a rag 
of information in a county paper has divined 
the true inwardness of a complicated controversy 
at Washington which you happen to know all 
about. She has been reforming a poorhouse. 

A is a clergyman, good but ineffective. He 
relies on beneficence and persuasion. He does 
not know the world better than a club loafer 
knows it. The only entry to it is by attack, the 
only progress by action. 

B is a good fellow, yet betrays a momentary 
want of delicacy which gives you a shock, and 
which you forgive him, saying: "It is a coarse- 
ness of natural fiber." It is no such thing. 
There is in every man a natural fiber as fine as a 
poet's. His coarseness is the residuum of an act. 

You meet a man whom you have known as a 
court stenographer, and whom you have sup- 
posed to be drowned in worldly cares. At a 
chophouse he gives you a discourse on Plato's 
Phaedrus, which he interprets in a novel way. 
The brains of the man surprise you. This man, 
though he looks sordid, positively must have 
been sending a younger brother to college during 
many years. There is no other explanation of 
him. 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 11 

The nemesis of conduct then stalks about in 
the form of a natural law, not as the pseudo 
science of fancy, but as a mode of growth, 
modestly formulated by a great naturalist. 

Take the matter up on its other side. You 
can only discover in the universe, try how you 
will, strain your eyes how you please, you can 
only see what you have lived. Out of our ac- 
tivity comes our character, and it is with this 
that we see beauty or ugliness, hope or despair. 
It is by this that we gauge the operation of 
economic law and of all other spiritual forces. 
It is with this that we interpret all things. What 
we see is only our own lives. 

We are all more or less in contact with human 
life. We live in a pandemonium, a paradise of 
illustrations, and if we have only eyes to see, 
there is enough in any tenement house to-day to 
lay bare the heart and progress of Greek art. 

But the worst is to come — the horror that 
makes intellect a plaything. By a double 
consequence the past fetters the future. Once 
take any course and our eyes begin to see it as 
right, our hearts to justify it. Only lighting can 
save us, and we see nothing to fight for. Thral- 
dom enters, and night like death where no voice 
reaches. The eternal struggle is for vision. 

How idiotic are the compliments or the 
contempt of the inexperienced! Nothing but 
life teaches, Hallam thinks Juliet immodest, 



12 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

and he had read all the literatures of Europe. 
If you want to understand the Greek civilization 
you have got to be Sophocles. If you want to 
understand the New Testament you have got 
to be Christ. If you want to understand that 
most complex and difficult of all things, the 
present, you must be some or all of it, some of it 
any way. You must have it ground into you by 
a contact so wrenchingly close, by a struggle so 
severe, that you lose consciousness, and after- 
wards — next year — you will understand. 

Here is the reaction familiar to all men since 
the dawn of history, which makes the man of 
action the hero of all times. It goes in courage, 
it comes out power. 

This reaction, this transformation, goes for- 
ward in the very stuff that we are made of, and 
if we come to look at it closely, we are obliged to 
speak of it in terms of consciousness. There are 
so many different kinds of consciousness that 
the best we can do is to remind some one else of 
the kind we mean. The hand of the violinist is 
unconscious to the extent that it is functioning 
properly, and as his command over music 
develops this unconsciousness creeps up his 
arm and possesses his brain and being, until he, 
as he plays, is completely wwself-conscious and 
his music is the mere projection of an organism 
which is functioning freely. 

But this condition of complete concentration 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 13 

makes us in a different sense of the word self- 
conscious in the highest degree, self-comprehend- 
ing, self-controlled, self-expressing. And it is in 
this philosophical sense that the word self- 
conscious is used by the Germans, and may 
sometimes be conveniently used by us, if we can 
do so without foregoing the right to use the 
words conscious and unconscious in their popular 
sense at other times. 

The discovery of Froebel was that this 
mastery over our own powers was to be obtained 
only through creative activity. The suggestion, 
it may be noted, is destined to reorganize every 
school of violin playing in Europe. For we have 
here the major canon of a rational criticism. 
We find that in the old vocabulary such words 
as genius, temperament, style, originality, etc., 
have always been fumblingly used to denote 
different degrees in which some man's brain was 
working freely and with full self-consciousness. 
A deliverance of this kind has always been 
designated as "creative,' ' no matter in what field 
it was found. 

Approaching the matter more closely, we see 
that the whole of the man must have responded 
in real life to every particle of experience which 
he uses in his work. An imitation means some- 
thing which does not represent an original 
unitary vibration. 

Goethe puts in the mouth of the mad Gretchen 



14 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

a snatch of German song in imitation of Ophelia. 
The treatment does not fit the character. It 
has only been through that part of Goethe's 
mind with which he read Shakespeare. As a 
sequel to this suggestion, the peasant of the 
early scenes has lavished upon her all the 
various reminiscences of the pathetic that 
Goethe could muster. It is moving, but it is 
inorganic. It is not true. 

For note this, that while it takes the whole of 
a man to do anything true, no matter how 
small, anything that the whole of him does is 
right. Hence the inimitable grotesques of 
greatness, the puns in tragedy. These things 
belong to the very arcana of nature. By and by, 
when the reasons are understood, nature will be 
respected. No one will attempt to imitate 
genius, or to reproduce an artistic effect of any 
kind. 

If we look at recent literature by the light of 
this canon, we find the reason for its inferiority. 
It is the work of half minds, of men upon whose 
intelligence the weight of a dogma is pressing. 

The eclipse of philosophy was of course 
reflected in fiction. There is the same trouble 
with Herbert Spencer as with Zola. Each of 
them thinks to wrest the secrets of sociology 
from external observation. Their books lack 
objectivity and are ephemeral. Kant and Balzac 
did better because their method was truer. 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 15 

Everything good that has been done in the 
last fifty years has been done in the teeth of 
current science. The whole raft of English 
scientists are children playing with Raphael's 
brushes the moment they leave some specialty. 
There never lived a set of men more blinded by 
dogma, blinded to the meaning of the past, to 
the trend of the future, by the belief that they 
had found new truth. Not one of them can lift 
the stone and show what lies under Darwin's 
demonstration. They run about with little 
pamphlets and proclaim a New Universe like 
Frenchmen. They bundle up all beliefs into a 
great Dogma of Unbelief, and throw away the 
kernel of life with the shell. This was inevitable. 
A generation or two v/as well sacrificed, in this 
last fusillade of the Dogma of Science — the old 
guard dogma that dies but never surrenders. 
Hereafter it will be plain that the whole matter 
is a matter of symbols on the one hand, knowl- 
edge of human nature on the other. 

Herbert Spencer has been a useful church- 
warden to science, but his knowledge of life was 
so trifling, his own personal development so 
one-sided, that his sociology is a farce. 

This canon of criticism explains in a very 
simple manner the art ages, times when appar- 
ently every one could paint, or speak, or com- 
pose. The art which is lost is really the art of 
courageous action. Neither war nor dogma 



16 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

nor revolution is necessary, for feeling can no 
more be lost than force, and the power to express 
it depends upon an interest in life. The past 
has enriched us with conventions, and whenever 
a man or a group of men arises who uses them 
and is not subdued to them, we have art. The 
thing is easy. To the doers it is a mere knack 
of the attention. 

We had almost thought that art was finished, 
and we find we are standing at the beginning of 
all things. Froebel has found a formula which 
fits every human activity. 

Let us take the supreme case, the apogee of 
human development, and what will it be? 

The sum of all possible human knowledge is, 
as we have seen, an expansion of our under- 
standing of human nature, and this is got by 
intercourse, by dealing with men, by getting 
them to do something. In order to make them 
do it, in order to govern, you must understand, 
and the rulers of mankind are the wisest of the 
species. They summarize society. Solomon, 
Caesar, Hildebrand, Lincoln, Bismarck, these 
men knew their world. 

But if a virtuous ruler be the prototype of all 
possible human fulfillment, there is no other art 
or province of employment to which the same 
views do not apply. When any man reaps 
some of the power which his toil has sown, and 
throws it out as a note or a book or a statue, it 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 17 

has an organic relation to the human soul and 
is valuable forever. There is only one rule of 
art. Let a man work at a thing till it looks 
right to him. Let him adjust and refine it till, 
as he looks at it, it passes straight into him, and 
he grows for a moment unconscious again, that 
the forces which produced it may be satisfied. 
As it stands then, it is the best he can do. In so 
far as we completely develop this power we be- 
come completely happy and completely useful, for 
our acts, our statements, our notes, our books, 
our statues, become universally significant. 

Once feel this truth, and you begin to lose the 
sense of your identity, to know that your 
destiny, your self, is an organic part of all men. 
It is they that speak. It is themselves that 
have been found and expressed. It was this 
toward which we tended, this that we cared for 
— action, art, intellect, unselfishness, are they 
not one thing? 

The complete development of every individual 
is necessary to our complete happiness. And 
there is no reason why any one who has ever 
been to a dull dinner party should doubt this. 
Nay, history gives proof that solitude is danger- 
ous. Man cannot sing, nor write, nor paint, 
nor reform, nor build, nor do anything except 
die, alone. The reasons for this are showered 
upon us by the idea of Froebel, no matter which 
side of it is turned toward us. 



18 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

This philosophy which seemed so dry till we 
began to see what it meant, begins now to cir- 
cumscribe God and include everything. For 
Christ himself was one whose thoughts were 
laws and whose deeds are universal truth. 
Shakespeare's plays are universal truth. They 
are the projection of a completely developed 
and completely unconscious human intellect. 
They educated Germany, and it is to the study 
of them that Hegel's view of life is due. The 
great educational forces in the world are propor- 
tioned in power to the development of the 
individual man in the epochs they date from. 
Here and there, out of a hotbed, arises a personal 
influence which directs thought for a thousand 
years and qualifies time forever. 

The division of the old ethics into egoism 
and altruism receives the sanction of science. 
The turning of the attention upon selfish ends, 
no matter how remote nor how momentary, 
hurts the organism, contracts the intellect, 
dries up the emotions, and is felt as unhappiness. 
The turning of the attention toward public aims 
benefits the organism, enlarges the intellect, 
and is felt as happiness. There is no complexity 
possible, for any mixed motive is a selfish 
motive. 

All the virtues are different names for the 
injunction of self-mastery, by which the internal 
struggle is made more severe, and the force 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 19 

cooped in and controlled until it is released in 
the functioning of the whole man. 

In any sincere struggle for right, then, no 
matter how petty, we are fighting for mankind, 
and this is just what everybody has always 
known, always believed. 

It is thrown at us as a great paradox, that 
somebody must pay the bills; that if you live 
upon charity and can succeed in getting yourself 
crucified, you are still a mere product of thrift 
and selfishness somewhere. But the paradox is 
the same if put the other way, for selfishness 
would never support you. 

The question is purely one of fact, what thing 
comes first, what thing satisfies the heart of 
man. He may support himself merely as a 
means to help others. A man may start a 
pauper and die a millionaire, and yet never 
think a thought or do an act which does not add 
to the welfare of man. It is a question of 
ultimate controlling intention. 

Man the microcosm is a kingdom where 
reigns continual war. Now he is a furnace of 
love, the next moment he is a mean scamp. We 
know very little about the mechanism by which 
these microcosms communicate with one an- 
other. It seems likely that every iota of feeling 
must be either transmitted or transformed; 
that if a spasm of selfishness be conveyed, or 
some part of it, even by a glimpse of the eye, it 



20 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

must leave a record of injury and start on a 
career of injury, just so much loss to the world. 
On the other hand it may be transformed into 
the other kind of force and expended later in 
good. 

The thing is governed by some simple law, 
although man has not yet been able to reduce 
it to algebra. What is most curious is this, 
that the tendency of any man to believe in the 
reaction as a law, is not dependent upon his 
scientific training, but upon his moral experience. 
The best heads in physics will still betray a 
belief that a man must be able to afford to be 
unselfish, that selfishness often does good, that 
it is a muddled up affair, and a thing outside of 
science which they will get round to later. 
Everybody sees a few degrees in the arc of this 
law. Read the index on the quadrant and you 
will have his character. Now and then some 
saint swears he sees a circle. 

Let us press the inquest. It is not likely that 
life itself is duplex or consists of two kinds of 
force, one egoistic, one altruistic. The likelihood 
is the other way. There is only one force which 
vibrates through these organisms. It is abso- 
lutely beneficent only when it completely con- 
trols one of them, so that the whole thing 
sings together. 

This music is the highest, but the notes that 
go to make it up are everywhere. Altruism 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 21 

does not arise, is not imposed from without, at 
any period or by any crisis, by progress or by 
society. The spiral unwinds with the unwind- 
ing life upon the globe. It is the form of illusion 
under which all life proceeds. It is the law of 
mind. The eye treats space and color as entities. 
It cannot see on any other terms. The stomach 
digests food, but not its own lining. We are 
obliged to think in terms of the objective 
universe. We are not wholesome unless we are 
self- forgetting. There is no cranny in all the 
million manifestations of nature where you can 
interfere between the organism and its object 
without representing disease. 

And man is more than a mere altruistic 
animal. At least the religions of Humanity 
have never expressed him. At those times 
when he is entirely unselfish and therefore 
entirely himself, when he feels himself to be one 
single well-spring, all unselfishness, all love, all 
reverence, all service to something not himself, 
yet something personal, he has faith. The 
theologies are attempts to formulate this state of 
mind in order that it may be preserved. It is 
clear enough that every mind must speak in its 
own symbols, and that the symbols of one must 
always appear to another as illusions. Yet each 
man for himself knows he faces a reality. This 
is a psychological necessity. Destroy the belief, 
and on the instant he changes. Show him that 



22 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

he is the victim of an illusion, and he is divided, 
a half man. A man whose mind is divided, as, 
for instance, by the consciousness of a personal 
motive, cannot believe. He stands Hke the 
wicked king in the play of Hamlet; unable to 
pray. It is a psychological impossibility. 

The concern of mankind for their forms of 
doctrine is gratuitous. Faith re-appears under 
new names. You cannot convince a lover that 
he is bent on self-development, nor any decent 
man that he does not believe in, is not controlled 
by, something higher than himself. The question 
is not one of words. 

We may trace this reverent attitude of mind 
upward through the acts and activities of the 
spirit, and it makes no difference whether we 
regard religion as the source and origin of them 
all or as the summary of them all. 

In Shakespeare's plays we see a cycle of 
human beings, the most living that we have 
ever met with, and the absence of mystical or 
emotional religion from many of the plays is one 
of the wonders of nature. There is no God any- 
where, and God is everywhere; we are not 
offended. The reason may be that the element 
has been employed in the act of creation. 
Religion has been consumed in the development 
of character. It is felt in the relation of Shake- 
speare to the characters. It is here seen as 
artistic perfection. The same is true of the 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 23 

Greek statues and of the Sistine Sibyls, and of 
other work left by those two periods, the only 
other periods in which the individual attained 
completion. 

Observe that in all this philosophy there is no 
dogma anywhere, no term whose definition you 
have to learn, no term which makes the lying 
claim that it can be used twice with the same 
connotation. Froebel had the instinct of a poet 
and knew his language was figurative. It was 
this that freed him from the Middle Ages and 
gave him to the future. He took theology as 
lightly as he took metaphysics. He did not 
impose them, he evoked them. He lived and 
thought in the spirit. 

If you turn from Froebel's analysis of human 
nature to Goethe's, there seem to be a thousand 
years between them. The one is scientific, the 
other is mediaeval. The one has freed himself 
from the influences of the revival of learning, 
the other has not. The one is open, the other is 
closed. The one is free, the other is self-con- 
scious. But Froebel has not yet set free the 
rest of the race, and of course the literature and 
practices of the kindergartners are full of dogmas. 
The terms of Froebel are a snare to those whose 
interest in childhood came later than their 
interest in education and whose attention is 
fixed upon the terms rather than upon the child. 
He is easy reading to the other sort. 



24 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

But more important than Froebel's formu- 
lation of these great truths was his formulation 
of subsidiary truths. I do not mean his labored 
systems, but his practical suggestions born of 
experience as to how to help another person to 
develop. It was these methods, this attitude of 
the teacher towards the child, of the individual 
towards his fellow, that came at me in my 
own house unexpectedly, emanating from some 
unknown mind, which seemed so great as 
practically to include Christianity. 

"Do not imagine," he says at every moment, 
"that you can do anything for this creature 
except by getting it to move spontaneously. 
You have not begun till you have done this, and 
remember that anything else you do is just so 
much harm." 

He was never tired of suggesting devices for 
doing this. The following passage gives in a 
few words the answer to the most important 
practical question in life: how we ought to 
approach another human being. The thing is 
said so simply, it seems almost • commonplace, 
yet it comes from one greater than Kant. 

"Between educator and pupil, between re- 
quest and obedience, there should invisibly rule 
a third something to which educator and pupil 
are equally subject. This third something is the 
right, the best, necessarily conditioned and ex- 
pressed without arbitrariness in the circum- 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 25 

stances. The calm recognition, the clear 
knowledge, and the serene, cheerful obedience 
to the rule of this third something, is the par- 
ticular feature that should be constantly and 
clearly manifest in the bearing and the conduct 
of the educator and teacher, and often firmly 
and sternly emphasized by him." 

Beneath this statement there lies a law of 
reaction. The human organism responds in 
kind. Strike a man and he strikes, sneer and he 
sneers, forget and he forgets. If you wish to 
convince him that you are right, concede that 
from his point of view he is right, then move 
the point and he follows. If you keep your 
temper in teaching a child, you teach him to 
keep his temper, and this is more important 
than his lesson. 

The difficulty we find is to resist the reaction 
in ourselves to some one else's initiative. The 
affair is outside the province of reason, and 
results from a transfer of force by means which 
we do not understand. The command to "turn 
the other cheek" is a picturesque figure for the 
attitude which will enable you to prevail the 
quickest and by the highest means, and which 
Froebel enables us to see in its scientific aspect. 

But it is unnecessary to illustrate further 
what any one who comes in contact with a 
kindergarten will, through all the mists of 
dogma and ignorance which overspread the 



26 EDUCATION: FROEBEL 

place, discover for himself. We have a science 
founded upon human nature, applied to educa- 
tion. Mr. Hughes in his closing paragraph 
uses the language of theology, but he makes no 
overstatement : — 

"When Froebel's ethical teaching has wrought 
its perfect work in the homes, the schools, and 
the churches, then his complete ideal, which is 
the gospel ideal in practice, will be the greatest 
controlling and uplifting force in the world." 

One word more about the relation between 
Froebel's thought and current science. 

The view of man as an active animal, a 
struggler, alive and happy only in activity, falls 
in naturally with what we know of the animal 
kingdom. The philosophers are at war over 
science and religion, over the origin of the non- 
self-regarding instincts. By an external con- 
sideration of the animal hierarchy they have 
come to certain conclusions which they strive to 
apply to the highest animal, man. There is 
great boggling over him, because these non- 
self-regarding instincts, which are not very 
apparent from the outside, seem to conflict 
with certain generalizations relative to the 
conservation of species. The scientists look 
into a drop of water and see animals eating 
each other up. What they have not seen is that 
all this ferocity goes forward, subject to customs 
as rigid as a military code, and that it is this 



EDUCATION: FROEBEL 27 

code which conserves the species. The "struggle 
for existence" as it is commonly conceived 
would exterminate in short order any species 
that indulged in it. 

Meanwhile Froebel, beginning at the other 
end of the scale and studying life from the 
inside, has established certain facts, certain 
laws, which have as great a weight, and deserve 
as much to be carried downward in the scale, as 
the generalizations of the naturalists (very likely 
imperfect) have to be carried upward. 

The animal man is unselfish. It is impossible 
to make his organism vibrate as a unity except 
by some emotion which can be shown to be non- 
self-regarding. At what point in the scale of 
nature does this quality begin to manifest 
itself? Is the dog happy when he is selfish: do 
the laws of psychology outlined by Froebel 
apply, and to what extent do they apply, to the 
horse or the monkey? These things must be 
patiently studied, and the corrections must be 
made. In the mean time, in dealing with man 
himself, we are obliged to rely upon the latest 
scientific report of him, however imperfect, and 
until Froebel's laws are destroyed, we need not 
attempt to adjust our ideas of man to the 
dogmas developed by the study of the lower 
animals. 



IN KEILHAU 

Reprinted by permission from The Story of my Life, by Georg 
fibers. 

KEILHAU! How much is comprised 
in that one short word ! 
It recalls to my memory the 
pure happiness of the fairest period 
of boyhood, a throng of honored, beloved, and 
merry figures, and hundreds of stirring, bright. 
and amusing scenes in a period of life rich in 
instruction and amusement, as well as the stage 
so lavishly endowed by Nature on which they 
were performed. Jean Paul has termed melan- 
choly the blending of joy and pain, and it was 
doubtless a kindred feeling which filled my 
heart in the days before my departure, and 
induced me to be particularly good and obliging 
to everybody in the house. My mother took us 
once more to my father's grave in the Drei- 
faltigkeits cemetery, where I made many good 
resolutions. Only the best reports should reach 
home from Keilhau, and I had already obtained 
excellent ones in Berlin. 

On the evening of our departure there were 
numerous kisses and farewell glances at all that 
was left behind ; but when we were seated in the 



IN KEILHAU 29 

car with my mother, rushing through the land- 
scape adorned with the most luxuriant spring 
foHage, my heart suddenly expanded, and the 
pleasure of travel and delight in the many new 
scenes before me destroyed every other feeling. 
The first vineyard I saw at Naumburg — I had 
long forgotten those on the Rhine — interested 
me deeply; the Rudelsburg at Kosen, the ruins 
of a real ancient castle, pleased me no less be- 
cause I had never heard Franz Kugler's song: 

"Beside the Saale's verdant strand 
Once stood full many a castle grand, 
But roofless ruins are they all; 
The wind sweeps through from hall to hall; 
Slow drift the clouds above," 

which refers to this charming part of the Thu- 
ringian hill country. We were soon to learn to 
sing it at Keilhau. Weimar was the first goal of 
this journey. We had heard much of our classic 
poets; nay, I knew Schiller's Bell and some of 
Goethe's poems by heart, and we had heard 
them mentioned with deep reverence. Now we 
were to see their home, and a strange emotion 
took possession of me when we entered it. 

Every detail of this first journey has remained 
stamped on my memory. I even know what we 
ordered for supper at the hotel where we spent 
the night. But my mother had a severe head- 
ache, so we saw none of the sights of Weimar 



30 IN KEILHAU 

except the Goethe house in the city and the other 
one in the park. I cannot tell what my feelings 
were, they are too strongly blended with later 
impressions. I only know that the latter espe- 
cially seemed to me very small. I had imagined 
the "Goethe House" like the palace of the 
Prince of Prussia or Prince Radziwill in Wilhelm- 
strasse. The Grand Duke's palace, on the 
contrary, appeared aristocratic and stately. We 
looked at it very closely, because it was the 
birthplace of the Princess of Prussia, of whom 
Fraulein Lamperi had told us so much. 

The next morning my m.other v/as well again. 
The railroad connecting Weimar and Rudolstadt, 
near which Keilhau is located, was built long 
after, so we continued our journey in an open 
carriage and reached Rudolstadt about noon. 

After we had rested a short time, the carriage 
which was to take us to Keilhau drove up. 

As we were getting in, an old gentleman ap- 
proached, who instantly made a strong impres- 
sion upon me. In outward appearance he bore a 
marked resemblance to Wilhelm Grimm. I 
should have noticed him among hundreds; for 
long gray locks, parted in the middle, floated 
around a nobly formed head, his massive yet 
refined features bore the stamp of a most kindly 
nature, and his eyes were the mirror of a pure, 
childlike soul. The rare charm of their sunny 
sparkle, when his warm heart expanded to 



IN KEILHAU 31 

pleasure or his keen intellect had succeeded in 
solving any problem, comes back vividly to my 
memory as I write, and they beamed brightly 
enough when he perceived our companion. 
They were old acquaintances, for my mother had 
been to Keilhau several times on Martin's ac- 
count. She addressed him by the name of 
Middendorf, and we recognized him as one of 
the heads of the institute, of whom we had heard 
many pleasant things. 

He had driven to Rudolstadt with the "old 
bay," but he willingly accepted a seat in pur car- 
riage. 

We had scarcely left the street with the hotel 
behind us, when he began to speak of Schiller, 
and pointed out the mountain which bore his 
name and to which in his "Walk" he had cried: 

"Hail! oh my Mount, with radiant crimson 
peak." 

Then he told us of the Lengefeld sisters, whom 
the poet had so often met here, and one of whom, 
Charlotte, afterward became his wife. All this 
was done in a way which had no touch of peda- 
gogy or of anything specially prepared for chil- 
dren, yet every word was easily understood and 
interested us. Besides, his voice had a deep, 
musical tone, to which my ear was susceptible at 
an early age. He understood children of our 
disposition and knew what pleased them. 



32 IN KEILHAU 

In Schaale, the first village through which we 
passed, he said, pointing to the stream which 
flowed into the Saale close by: "Look, boys, 
now we are coming into our own neighborhood, 
the valley of the Schaal. It owes its name to 
this brook, which rises in our own meadows, and 
I suppose you would like to know why our village 
is called Keilhau?" 

While speaking, he pointed up the stream and 
briefly described its course. 

We assented. 

We had passed the village of Schaale. The one 
before us, with the church, was called Eichfeld, 
and at our right was another which we could not 
see, Lichtstadt. In ancient times, he told us, the 
mountain sides and the bottom of the whole 
valley had been clothed with dense oak forests. 
Then people came who wanted to till the ground. 
They began to clear (lichten) these woods at 
Lichtstadt. This was a difficult task, and they 
had used axes (Keile) for the purpose. At 
Eichfeld they felled the oaks (Eiche), and carried 
the trunks to Schaale, where the bark (Schale) 
was stripped off to make tan for the tanners on 
the Saale. So the name of Lichtstadt came from 
the clearing of the forests, Eichfeld from the felling 
of the oaks, Schaale from stripping off the hark, 
and Keilhau from the hewing with axes. 

This simple tale of ancient times had sprung 
from the Thuringian soil, so rich in legends, and, 



IN KEILHAU 33 

little as it might satisfy the etymologist, it de- 
lighted me. I believed it, and when afterward I 
looked down from a height into the valley and 
saw the Saale, my imagination clothed the bare 
or pine-clad mountain slopes with huge oak for- 
ests, and beheld the giant forms of the ancient 
Thuringians felling the trees with their heavy 
axes. 

The idea of violence which seemed to be con- 
nected with the name of Keilhau had suddenly 
disappeared. It had gained meaning to me, 
and Herr Middendorf had given us an excellent 
proof of a fundamental requirement of Friedrich 
Froebel, the founder of the institution: "The 
external must be spiritualized and given an inner 
significance." 

The same talented pedagogue had said, "Our 
education associates instruction with the external 
world which surrounds the human being as child 
and youth"; and Middendorf carried out this 
precept when, at the first meeting, he questioned 
us about the trees and bushes by the wayside, 
and when we were obliged to confess our igno- 
rance of most of them, he mentioned their names 
and described their peculiarities. 

At last we reached the Keilhau plain, a bowl 
whose walls formed tolerably high mountains 
which surrounded it on all sides except toward 
Rudolstadt, where an opening permitted the 
Schaalbach to wind through meadows and fields. 



34 IN KEILHAU 

So the village lies like an egg in a nest open in one 
direction, like the beetle in the calyx of a flower 
which has lost one of its leaves. Nature has 
girded it on three sides with protecting walls 
which keep the wind from entering the valley, 
and to this, and the delicious, crystal-clear water 
which flows from the mountains into the pumps, 
its surprising healthfulness is doubtless due. 
During my residence there of four and a half 
years there was no epidemic disease among the 
boys, and on the fiftieth jubilee of the institute, 
in 1867, which I attended, the statement was 
made that during the half century of its existence 
only one pupil had died, and he had had heart 
disease when his parents sent him to the school. 

We must have arrived on Sunday, for we met 
on the road several peasants in long blue coats, 
and peasant women in dark cloth cloaks with 
gold-embroidered borders, and little black caps 
from which ribbons three or four feet long hung 
down the wearers' backs. The cloaks descended 
from mother to daughter. They were very 
heavy, yet I afterward saw peasant women wear 
them to church in summer. 

At last we drove into the broad village street. 
At the right, opposite to the first houses, lay a 
small pond called the village pool, on which ducks 
and geese floated, and whose dark surface, 
glittering with many hues, reflected the shep- 
herd's hut. After we had passed some very fine 



IN KEILHAU 35 

farmhouses, we reached the "Plan," where 
bright waters plashed into a stone trough, a 
linden tree shaded the dancing-ground, and a 
pretty house was pointed out as the schoolhouse 
of the village children. 

A short distance farther away the church rose 
in the background. But we had no time to look 
at it, for we were already driving up to the 
institute itself, which was at the end of the 
village, and consisted of two rows of houses with 
an open space closed at the rear by the wide 
front of a large building. 

The bakery, a small dwelling, and the large 
gymnasium were at our left ; on the right, the so- 
called Lower House, with the residences of the 
head-masters' families, and the school and sleep- 
ing-rooms of the smaller pupils, whom we dubbed 
the " Panzen," and among whom were boys only 
eight and nine years old. 

The large house before whose central door — to 
which a flight of stone steps led — we stopped, 
was the Upper House, our future home. 

Almost at the same moment we heard a loud 
noise inside, and an army of boys came rushing 
down the steps. These were the "pupils," and 
my heart began to throb faster. 

They gathered around the Rudolstadt carriage 
boldly enough and stared at us. I noticed that 
almost all were bareheaded. Many wore their 
hair falling in long locks down their backs. The 



36 IN KEILHAU 

few who had any coverings used black velvet 
caps, such as in Berlin would be seen only at the 
theater or in an artist's studio. 

Middendorf had stepped quickly among the 
lads, and as they came running up to take his 
hand or hang on his arm we saw how they loved 
him. 

But we had little time for observation. 
Barop, the head-master, was already hastening 
down the steps, welcoming my mother and our- 
selves with his deep, musical tones, in a pure 
Westphalian dialect. 

Entering the Institute. 

Barop's voice sounded so sincere and cordial 
that it banished every thought of fear, otherwise 
his appearance might have inspired boys of our 
age with a certain degree of timidity, for he was 
a broad-shouldered man of gigantic stature, who, 
like Middendorf, v/ore his gray hair parted in the 
middle, though it was cut somewhat shorter. A 
pair of dark eyes sparkled under heavy, bushy 
brows, which gave them the aspect of clear 
springs shaded by dense thickets. They now gazed 
kindly at us, but later we were to learn their 
irresistible power. I have said, and I still think, 
that the eyes of the artist, Peter Cornelius, are 
the most forceful I have ever seen, for the very 
genius of art gazed from them. Those of our 
Barop produced no weaker influence in their 



IN KEILHAU 37 

way, for they revealed scarcely less impressively 
the character of a man. To them, especially, 
was due the implicit obedience that every one 
rendered him. When they flashed with indigna- 
tion the defiance of the boldest and most re- 
fractory quailed. But they could sparkle 
cheerily, too, and whoever met his frank, kindly 
gaze felt honored and uplifted. 

Earnest, thoroughly natural, able, strong, 
rehable, rigidly just, free from any touch of 
caprice, he lacked no quality demanded by his 
arduous profession, and hence he whom even 
the youngest addressed as "Barop" never failed 
for an instant to receive the respect which was 
his due, and, moreover, had from us all the 
voluntary gift of affection, nay, of love. He 
was, I repeat, every inch a man. 

When very young, the conviction that the 
education of German boys was his real calling 
obtained so firm a hold upon his mind that he 
could not be dissuaded from giving up the study 
of the law, in which he had made considerable 
progress at Halle, and devoting himself to 
pedagogy. 

His father, a busy lawyer, had threatened him 
with disinheritance if he did not relinquish his 
intention of accepting the by no means brilliant 
position of a teacher at Keilhau ; but he remained 
loyal to his choice, though his father executed 
his threat and cast him off. After the old gentle- 



38 IN KEILHAU 

man's death his brothers and sisters voluntarily 
restored his portion of the property, but, as he 
himself told me long after, the quarrel with one 
so dear to him saddened his life for years. For 
the sake of the "fidelity to one's self" which he 
required from others he had lost his father's love, 
but he had obeyed a resistless inner voice, and 
the genuineness of his vocation was to be 
brilliantly proved. 

Success followed his efforts, though he assumed 
the management of the Keilhau Institute under 
the most difficult circumstances. 

Beneath its roof he had found in the niece of 
Friedrich Froebel a beloved wife, peculiarly 
suited both to him and to her future position. 
She was as little as he was big, but what energy, 
what tireless activity this dainty, delicate 
woman possessed ! To each one of us she showed 
a mother's sympathy, managed the whole great 
household down to the smallest details, and 
certainly neglected nothing in the care of her 
own sons and daughters. 

A third master, the archdeacon Langethal, 
was one of the founders of the institution, but 
had left it several years before. 

As I mention him with the same warmth that 
I speak of Middendorf and Barop, many readers 
will suspect that this portion of my reminis- 
cences contains a receipt for favors, and that 
reverence and gratitude, nay, perhaps the fear 



IN KEILHAU 39 

of injuring an institution still existing, induces 
me to show only the lights and cover the shad- 
ows with the mantle of love. 

I will not deny that a boy from eleven to fifteen 
years readily overlooks in those who occupy an 
almost paternal relation to him faults which 
would be immediately noted by the unclouded 
eyes of a critical observer; but I consider myself 
justified in describing what I saw in my youth 
exactly as it impressed itself on my memory. I 
have never perceived the smallest liaw or even a 
trait or act worthy of censure in either Barop, 
Middendorf, or Langethal. Finally, I may say 
that, after having learned in later years from 
abundant data willingly placed at my disposal 
by Johannes Barop, our teacher's son and the 
present master of the institute, the most minute 
details concerning their character and work, 
none of these images have sustained any ma- 
terial injury. 

In Friedrich Froebel, the real founder of the 
institute, who repeatedly lived among us for 
months, I have learned to know from his own 
works and the comprehensive amount of litera- 
ture devoted to him, a really talented idealist, 
who on the one hand cannot be absolved from an 
amazing contempt for or indifference to the 
material demands of life, and on the other 
possessed a certain artless selfishness which 
gave him courage, whenever he wished to pro- 



40 IN KEILHAU 

mote objects undoubtedly pure and noble, to 
deal arbitrarily with other lives, even where it 
could hardly redound to their advantage. I 
shall have more to say of him later. 

The source of Middendorf's greatness in the 
sphere where life and his own choice had placed 
him may even be imputed to him as a fault. He, 
the most enthusiastic of all Froebel's disciples, 
remained to his life's end a lovable child, in 
whom the powers of a rich poetic soul surpassed 
those of the thoughtful, well-trained mind. He 
would have been ill-adapted for any practical 
position, but no one could be better suited to 
enter into the soul-life of young human beings, 
cherish and ennoble them. 

A deeper insight into the lives of Barop and 
Langethal taught me to prize these men more 
and more. 

They have all rested under the sod for decades, 
and though their institute, to which I owe so 
much, has remained dear and precious, and the 
years I spent in the pleasant Thuringian moun- 
tain valley are numbered among the fairest in 
my Hfe, I must renounce making proselytes for 
the Keilhau Institute, because when I saw its 
present head for the last time, as a very young 
man, I heard from him, to my sincere regret, 
that, since the introduction of the law of military 
service, he found himself compelled to make the 
course of study at Rudolstadt conform to the 



IN KEILHAU 41 

system of teaching in a Realschule.* He was 
forced to do so in order to give his graduates the 
certificate for the one year's miHtary service. 

The classics, formerly held in such high esteem 
beneath its roof, must now rank below the 
sciences and modern languages, which are re- 
garded as most important. But love for Ger- 
many and the development of German character, 
which Froebel made the foundation of his 
method of education, are too deeply rooted there 
ever to be extirpated. Both are as zealously 
fostered in Keilhau now as in former years. 

After a cordial greeting from Barop, we had 
desks assigned us in the schoolroom, which were 
supplied with piles of books, writing materials, 
and other necessaries. Ludo's bed stood in the 
same dormitory with mine. Both were hard 
enough, but this had not damped our gay spirits, 
and when we were taken to the other boys we 
were soon playing merrily with the rest. 

The first difficulty occurred after supper, and 
proved to be one of the most serious I encoun- 
tered during my stay in the school. 

My mother had unpacked our trunks and ar- 
ranged everything in order. Among the articles 
were some which were new to the boys, and 
special notice was attracted by several pairs of 
kid gloves and a box of pomade which belonged 

* School in which the arts and sciences as well as the 
languages are taught. — Tr. 



42 IN KEILHAU 

in our pretty leather dressing-case, a gift from 
my grandmother. 

Dandified, or, as we should now term them, 
"dudish" afifairs, were not allowed at Keilhau; 
so various witticisms were made which culmi- 
nated when a pupil of about our own age from 
a city on the Weser called us Berlin pomade-pots. 
This vexed me, but a Berlin boy always has an 
answer ready, and mine was defiant enough. 
The matter might have ended here had not the 
same lad stroked my hair to see how Berlin 
pomade smelt. From a child nothing has been 
more unendurable than to feel a stranger's hand 
touch me, especially on the head, and, before I 
was aware of it, I had dealt my enemy a resound- 
ing slap. Of course, he instantly rushed at me, 
and there would have been a violent scuflfle had 
not the older pupils interfered. If we wanted to 
do anything, we must wrestle. This suited my 
antagonist, and I, too, was not averse to the 
contest, for I had unusually strong arms, a 
well-developed chest, and had practiced wres- 
tling in the Berlin gymnasium. 

The struggle began under the direction of the 
older pupils, and the grip on which I had relied 
did not fail. It consisted in clutching the an- 
tagonist just above the hips. If the latter were 
not greatly my superior, and I could exert my 
whole strength to clasp him to me, he was lost. 
This time the clever trick did its duty, and my 



IN KEILHAU 43 

adversary was speedily stretched on the ground. 
I turned my back on him, but he rose, panting 
breathlessly, "It's like a bear squeezing one.** 
In reply to every question from the older boys 
who stood around us laughing, he always made 
the same answer, "Like a bear." 

I had reason to remember this very common 
incident in boy life, for it gave me the nickname 
used by old and young till after my departure. 
Henceforward I was always called "the bear.'* 
Last year I had the pleasure of receiving a visit 
from Dr. Bareuther, a member of the Austrian 
Senate and a pupil of Keilhau. We had not met 
for forty years, and his first words were: "Look 
at me. Bear. Who am I?" 

My brother had brought his nickname with 
him, and everybody called him Ludo instead of 
Ludwig. The pretty, bright, agile lad, who also 
never flinched, soon became especially popular, 
and my companions were also fond of me, as I 
learned, when, during the last years of my stay 
at the institute, they elected me captain of the 
first Bergwart — that is, commander-in-chief of 
the whole body of pupils. 

My first fight secured my position forever. 
We doubtless owed our initiation on the second 
day into everything which was done by the 
pupils, both openly and secretly, to the good 
impression made by Martin. There was nothing 
wrong, and even where mischief was concerned 



44 IN KEILHAU 

I can term it to-day "harmless," The new boys 
or "foxes" were not neglected or "hazed," as in 
many other schools. Only every one, even the 
newly arrived younger teachers, was obliged to 
submit to the "initiation." This took place in 
winter, and consisted in being buried in the snow 
and having pockets, clothing, nay, even shirts, 
filled with the clean but wet mass. Yet I remem- 
ber no cold caused by this rude baptism. My 
mother remained several days with us, and as 
the weather was fine she accompanied us to the 
neighboring heights — the Kirschberg, to which, 
after the peaceful cemetery of the institute was 
left behind, a zigzag path led; the Kolm, at 
whose foot rose the Upper House; and the 
Steiger, from whose base flowed the Schaalbach, 
and whose summit afforded a view of a great 
portion of the Thuringian Mountains. 

We older pupils afterwards had a tall tower 
erected there as a monument to Barop, and the 
prospect from its lofty summit, which is more 
than a thousand feet high, is magnificent. 

Even before the completion of this lookout, 
the view was one of the most beautiful and 
widest far or near, and we were treated like most 
newcomers. During the ascent our eyes were 
bandaged, and when the handkerchief was 
removed a marvelous picture appeared before 
our astonished gaze. In the foreground, toward 
the left, rose the wooded height crowned by the 



IN KEILHAU 45 

stately ruins of the Blankenburg. Beyond 
opened the beautiful leafy bed of the Saale, 
proudly dominated by the Leuchtenburg. Be- 
fore us there was scarcely any barrier to the 
vision; for behind the nearer ranges of hills one 
chain of the wooded Thuringian Mountains 
towered beyond another, and where the horizon 
seemed to close the grand picture, peak after 
peak blended with the sky and the clouds, and 
the light veil of mist floating about them seemed 
to merge all into an indivisible whole. 

I have gazed from this spot into the distance 
at every hour of the day and season of the year. 
But the fairest time of all on the Steiger was at 
sunset, on clear autumn days, when the scene 
close at hand, where the threads of gossamer 
were floating, was steeped in golden light, the 
distance in such exquisite tints — from crimson 
to the deepest violet blue, edged with a line of 
light — the Saale glimmered with a silvery luster 
amid its fringe of alders, and the sun flashed on 
the glittering panes of the Leuchtenburg. 

We were now old enough to enjoy the magnifi- 
cence of this prospect. My young heart swelled 
at the sight; and if in after years my eyes could 
grasp the charm of a beautiful landscape and my 
pen successfully describe it, I learned the art here. 

It was pleasant, too, that my mother saw all 
this with us, though she must often have gone to 
rest very much wearied from her rambles. But 



46 IN KEILHAU 

teachers and pupils vied with each other in atten- 
tions to her. She had won all hearts. We 
noticed and rejoiced in it till the day came when 
she left us. 

She was obliged to start very early in the 
morning, in order to reach Berlin the same 
evening. The other boys were not up, but 
Barop, Middendorf, and several other teachers 
had risen to take leave of her. A few more 
kisses, a wave of her handkerchief, and the 
carriage vanished in the village. Ludo and I 
were alone, and I vividly remember the moment 
when we suddenly began to weep and sob as 
bitterly as if it had been an eternal farewell. 
How often one human being becomes the sun of 
another's life! And it is most frequently the 
mother who plays this beautiful part. 

Yet the anguish of parting did not last very 
long, and whoever had watched the boys playing 
ball an hour later would have heard our voices 
among the merriest. Afterwards we rarely had 
attacks of homesickness, there were so many new 
things in Keilhau, and even familiar objects 
seemed changed in form and purpose. 

From the city we were in every sense trans- 
ferred to the woods. 

True, we had grown up in the beautiful park 
of the Thiergarten, but only on its edge ; to live 
in and with Nature, "become one with her," as 
Middendorf said, we had not learned. 



IN KEILHAU 47 

I once read in a novel by Jensen, as a well- 
attested fact, that during an inquiry made in a 
charity school in the capital a considerable 
number of pupils had never seen a butterfly or 
a sunset. We were certainly not to be classed 
among such children. But our intercourse with 
Nature had been limited to formal visits which 
we were permitted to pay the august lady at 
stated intervals. In Keilhau she became a 
famiUar friend, and we therefore were soon 
initiated into many of her secrets; for none 
seemed to be withheld from our Middendorf and 
Barop, whom duty and inclination alike 
prompted to sharpen our ears also for her 
language. 

The Keilhau games and walks usually led up 
the mountains or into the forest, and here the 
older pupils acted as teachers, but not in any 
pedagogical way. Their own interest in what- 
ever was worthy of note in Nature was so keen 
that they could not help pointing it out to their 
less experienced companions. 

On our "picnics" from Berlin we had taken 
dainty mugs in order to drink from the wells; 
now we learned to seek and find the springs 
themselves, and how delicious the crystal fluid 
tastes from the hollow of the hand, Diogenes's 
drinking-cup ! 

Old Councillor Wellmer, in the Cred6 House, 
in Berlin, a zealous entomologist, owned a large 



48 IN KEILHAU 

collection of beetles, and had carefully impaled 
his pets on long slender pins in neat boxes, 
which filled numerous glass cases. They lacked 
nothing but life. In Keilhau we found every 
variety of insect in central Germany, on the 
bushes and in the moss, the turf, the bark of 
trees, or on the flowers and blades of grass, and 
they were alive and allowed us to watch them. 
Instead of neatly written labels, living lips told 
us their names. 

We had listened to the notes of the birds in the 
Thiergarten; but our mother, the tutor, the 
placards, our nice clothing, prohibited our 
following the feathered songsters into the 
thickets. But in Keilhau we were allowed to 
pursue them to their nests. The woods were 
open to every one, and nothing could injure our 
plain jackets and stout boots. Even in my 
second year at Keilhau I could distinguish all the 
notes of the numerous birds in the Thuringian 
forests, and, with Ludo, began the collection of 
eggs whose increase afforded us so much pleasure. 
Our teachers' love for all animate creation had 
made them impose bounds on the zeal of the 
egg-hunters, who were required always to leave 
one egg in the nest, and if it contained but one 
not to molest it. How many trees we climbed, 
what steep cliffs we scaled, through what crevices 
we squeezed to add a rare egg to our collection; 
nay, we even risked our limbs and necks! Life 



IN KEILHAU 49 

is valued so much less by the young, to whom it 
is brightest, and before whom it still stretches in 
a long vista, than by the old, for whom its 
charms are already beginning to fade, and who 
are near its end. 

I shall never forget the afternoon when, sup- 
plied with ropes and poles, we went to the Owl 
Mountain, which originally owed its name to 
Middendorf, because when he came to Keilhau 
he noticed that its xocky slope served as a home 
for several pairs of horned owls. Since then their 
numbers had increased, and for some time larger 
night birds had been flying in and out of a 
certain crevice. 

It was still the laying season, and their nests 
must be there. Climbing the steep precipice 
was no easy task, but we succeeded, and were 
then lowered from above into the crevice. At 
that time we set to work with the delight of 
discoverers, but now I frown when I consider 
that those who let first the daring Albrecht von 
Calm, of Brunswick, and then me into the chasm 
by ropes were boys of thirteen or fourteen at the 
utmost. Marbod, my companion's brother, 
was one of the strongest of our number, and we 
were obliged to force our way like chimney 
sweeps by pressing our hands and feet against 
the walls of the narrow rough crevice. Yet it 
now seems a miracle that the adventure resulted 
in no injury. Unfortunately, we found the 



50 IN KEILHAU 

young birds already hatched, and were compelled 
to return with our errand unperformed. But we 
afterward obtained such eggs, and their form is 
more nearly ball-shape than that seen in those 
of most other birds. We knew how the eggs of 
all the feathered guests of Germany were colored 
and marked, and the chest of drawers contain- 
ing our collection stood for years in my mother's 
attic. When I inquired about it a few years ago, 
it could not be found, and Ludo, who had helped 
in gathering it, lamented its loss with me. 

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL'S IDEAL OF EDUCATION 

Dangerous enterprises were of course forbid- 
den, but the teachers of the institute neglected 
no means of training our bodies to endure every 
exertion and peril; for Froebel was still alive, 
and the ideal of education, for whose realization 
he had established the Keilhau school, had 
become to his assistants and followers strong 
and healthy realities. But Froebel's purpose did 
not require the culture of physical strength. 
His most marked postulates were the preserva- 
tion and development of the individuality of the 
boys intrusted to his care, and their training in 
German character and German nature; for he 
beheld the sum of all the traits of higher, purer 
manhood united in those of the true German.* 



*What he terms "German" in his writings means 
manly and human in its higher sense. 



IN KEILHAU 51 

Love for the heart, strength for the character, 
seemed to him the highest gifts with which he 
could endow his pupils for life. 

He sought to rear the boy to unity with him- 
self, with God, with Nature, and with mankind, 
and the way led to trust in God through religion, 
trust in himself by developing the strength of 
mind and body, and confidence in mankind— 
that is, in others, by active relations with life 
and a loving interest in the past and present 
destinies of our fellow-men. This required an 
eye and heart open to our surroundings, socia- 
bility, and a deeper insight into history. Here 
Nature seems to be forgotten. But Nature 
comes into the category of religion, for to him 
religion means: To know and feel at one with 
ourselves, with God, and with man; to be loyal 
to ourselves, to God, and to Nature; and to re- 
main in continual active, living relations with 
God. 

The teacher must lead the pupils to men as 
well as to God and Nature, and direct them 
from action to perception and thought. For 
action he takes special degrees, capacity, skill, 
trustworthiness; for perception, consciousness, 
insight, clearness. Only the practical and 
clear-sighted man can maintain himself as a 
thinker, opening out as a teacher new trains 
of thought, and comprehending the basis of 



52 IN KEILHAU 

what is already acquired and the laws which 
govern it. 

Froebel wishes to have the child regarded as a 
bud on the great tree of life, and therefore each 
pupil needs to be considered individually, devel- 
oped mentally and physically, fostered and 
trained as a bud on the huge tree of the human 
race. Even as a system of instruction, education 
ought not to be a rigid plan, incapable of mod- 
ification; it should be adapted to the individu- 
ality of the child, the period in which it is growing 
to maturity, and its environment. The child 
should be led to feel, work, and act by its own 
experiences in the present and in its home, not 
by the opinions of others or by fixed, prescribed 
rules. From independent, carefully directed 
acts and knowledge, perceptions, and thoughts, 
the product of this education must come forth — 
a man, or, as it is elsewhere stated, a thorough 
German. At Keilhau he is to be perfected, 
converted into a finished production without 
a flaw. If the institute has fulfilled its duty to 
the individual, he will be: 

To Ms native land, a brave son in the hour of 
peril, in the spirit of self-sacrifice and sturdy 
strength. 

To the family, a faithful child and a father who 
will secure prosperity. 

To the state, an upright, honest, industrious 
citizen. 



IN KEILHAU 63 

To the army, a clear-sighted, strong, healthy, 
brave soldier and leader. 

To the trades, arts, and sciences, a skilled helper, 
an active promoter, a worker accustomed to 
thorough investigation, who has grown to 
maturity in close intercourse with Nature. 

To Jesus Christ, a faithful disciple and brother; 
a loving, obedient child of God. 

To mankind, a human being according to the 
image of God, and not according to that of a 
fashion journal. 

No one is reared for the drawing-room; but 
where there is a drawing-room in which mental 
gifts are fostered and truth finds an abode, a 
true graduate of Keilhau will be an ornament. 
"No instruction in bowing and tying cravats is 
necessary; people learn that only too quickly," 
said Froebel. 

The right education must be a harmonious 
one, and must be thoroughly in unison with the 
necessary phenomena and demands of human 
life. 

Thus the Keilhau system of education must 
claim the whole man, his inner as well as his outer 
existence. Its purpose is to watch the nature of 
each individual boy, his peculiarities, traits, 
talents, above all, his character, and afford to all 
the necessary development and culture. It 
follows step by step the development of the 
human being, from the almost instinctive 



54 IN KEILHAU 

impulse to feeling, consciousness, and will. At 
each one of these steps each child is permitted to 
have only what he can bear, understand, and 
assimilate, while at the same time it serves as a 
ladder to the next higher step of development 
and culture. In this way Froebel, whose own 
notes, collected from different sources, we are 
here following, hopes to guard against a defective 
or misdirected education; for what the pupil 
knows and can do has sprung, as it were, from 
his own brain. Nothing has been learned, but 
developed from within. Therefore the boy who 
is sent into the world will understand how to use 
it, and possess the means for his own further 
development and perfection from step to step. 
Every human being has a talent for some 
calling or vocation, and strength for its develop- 
ment. It is the task of the institute to cultivate 
the powers which are especially requisite for the 
future fulfillment of the calling appointed by 
Nature herself. Here, too, the advance must be 
step by step. Where talent or inclination lead, 
every individual will be prepared to deal with 
even the greatest obstacles, and must possess 
even the capacity to represent externally what 
has been perceived and thought — that is, to 
speak and write clearly and accurately — for in 
this way the intellectual power of the individual 
will first be made active and visible to others. 
We perceive that Froebel strongly antagonizes 



IN KEILHAU 55 

the Roman postulate that knowledge should be 
imparted to boys according to a thoroughly 
tested method and succession approved by the 
mature human intellect, and which seem most 
useful to it for later life. 

The systematic method which, up to the time 
of Pestalozzi, prevailed in Germany, and is 
again embodied in our present mode of educa- 
tion, seemed to him objectionable. The Swiss 
reformer pointed out that the mother's heart 
had instinctively found the only correct system 
of instruction, and set before the pedagogue the 
task of watching and cultivating the child's 
talents with maternal love and care. He utterly 
rejected the old system, and Froebel stationed 
himself as a fellow-combatant at his side, but 
went still further.* This stand required a high 
degree of courage at the time of the founding of 
Keilhau, when Hegel's influence was omnipotent 
in educational circles, for Hegel set before the 
school the task of imparting culture, and forgot 
that it lacked the most essential conditions; for 
the school can give only knowledge, while true 
education demands a close relation between the 
person to be educated and the world from which 



* Pestalozzi seemed to him in too great haste to fit the 
child for practical life. His mind should first lie before 
the teacher like an open book, and the instruction should 
then relate to whatever most warmly interested the 
pupil. After this was mastered, progress should first be 
made step by step. 



56 IN KEILHAU 

the school, as Hegel conceived it, is widely 
sundered. 

Froebel recognized that the extent of the 
knowledge imparted to each pupil was of less 
importance, and that the school could not be ex- 
pected to bestow on each individual a thor- 
oughly completed education, but an intellect so 
well trained that when the time came for him to 
enter into relations with the world and higher 
instructors he would have at his disposal the 
means to draw from both that form of culture 
which the school is unable to impart. He there- 
fore turned his back abruptly on the old system, 
denied that the main object of education was to 
meet the needs of after-life, and opposed having 
the interests of the child sacrificed to those of the 
man; for the child in his eyes is sacred, an 
independent blessing bestowed upon him by 
God, towards whom he has the one duty of 
restoring to those who confided it to him in a 
higher degree of perfection, with unfolded mind 
and soul, and a body and character steeled 
against every peril. "A child," he says, "who 
knows how to do right in his own childish sphere, 
will grow naturally into an upright manhood." 

With regard to instruction, his view, briefly 
stated, is as follows: The boy whose special tal- 
ents are carefully developed, to whom we give 
the power of absorbing and reproducing every- 
thing which is connected with his talent, will 



IN KEILHAU 57 

know how to assimilate, by his own work in the 
world and wider educational advantages, every- 
thing which will render him a perfect and 
thoroughly educated man. With half the 
amount of preliminary knowledge in the province 
of his specialty, the boy or youth dismissed by us 
as a harmoniously developed man, to whom we 
have given the methods requisite for the acquisi- 
tion of all desirable branches of knowledge, will 
accomplish more than his intellectual twin who 
has been trained according to the ideas of the 
Romans (and, let us add, Hegel). 

I think Froebel is right. If his educational 
principles were the common property of man- 
kind, we might hope for a realization of Jean 
Paul's prediction that the world would end with 
a child's paradise. We enjoyed a foretaste of 
this paradise in Keilhau. But when I survey 
our modern gymnasia I am forced to believe 
that if they should succeed in equipping their 
pupils with still greater numbers of rules for the 
future, the happiness of the child would be 
wholly sacrificed to the interests of the man, 
and the life of this world would close with the 
birth of overwise graybeards. I might well be 
tempted to devote still more time to the educa- 
tional principles of the man who, from the depths 
of his full, warm heart, addressed to parents 
the appeal, "Come, let us live for our children," 
but it would lead me beyond the allotted limits. 



58 TN KEILHAU 

Many of Froebel's pedagogical principles un- 
doubtedly appear at first sight a pallid theorem, 
partly a matter of course, partly impracticable. 
During our stay in Keilhau we never heard of 
these claims, concerning which we pupils were 
the subject of experiment. Far less did we feel 
that we were being educated according to any 
fixed method. We perceived very little of any 
form of government. The relation between 
us and our teachers was so natural and 
affectionate that it seemed as if no other was 
possible. 

Yet, when I compared our life at Keilhau with 
the principles previously mentioned, I found 
that Barop, Middendorf, and old Langethal, as 
well as the sub-teachers Bagge, Budstedt, and 
Schafi"ner, had followed them in our education, 
and succeeded in applying many of those which 
seemed the most difficult to carry into execution. 
This filled me with sincere admiration, though 
I soon perceived that it could have been done 
only by men in whom Froebel had transplanted 
his ideal, men who were no less enthusiastic 
concerning their profession than he, and whose 
personality predestined them to solve success- 
fully tasks which presented difficulties almost 
unconquerable by others. 

Every boy was to be educated according to his 
peculiar temperament, with special regard to his 
disposition, talents, and character. Although 



IN KEILHAU 59 

there were sixty of us, this was actually done in 
the case of each individual. 

Thus the teachers perceived that the endow- 
ments of my brother, with whom I had hitherto 
shared everything, required a totally different 
system of education from mine. While I was set 
to studying Greek, he was released from it and 
assigned to modern languages and the arts and 
sciences. They considered me better suited for 
a life of study, him qualified for some practical 
calling or a miHtary career. 

Even in the tasks allotted to each, and the 
opinions passed upon our physical and mental 
achievements, there never was any fixed stand- 
ard. These teachers always kept in view the 
whole individual, and especially his character. 
Thereby the parents of a Keilhau pupil were far 
better informed in many respects than those of 
our gymnasiasts, who so often yield to the 
temptation of estimating their sons' work by the 
greater or less number of errors in their Latin 
exercises. 

It afforded me genuine pleasure to look 
through the Keilhau reports. Each contained 
a description of character, with a criticism of the 
work accomplished, partly with reference to the 
pupil's capacity, partly to the demands of the 
school. Some are little masterpieces of psy- 
chological penetration. 

Many of those who have followed these 



60 IN KEILHAU 

statements will ask how the German nature 
and German character can be developed in the 
boys. 

It was thoroughly done in Keilhau. 

But the solution of the problem required men 
like Langethal and Middendorf, who, even in 
their personal appearance models of German 
strength and dignity, had fought for their native 
land, and who were surpassed in depth and 
warmth of feeling by no man. 

I repeat that what Froebel termed German 
was really the higher traits of human character; 
but nothing was more deeply imprinted on our 
souls than love for our native land. Here the 
young voices not only extolled the warlike deeds 
of the brave Prussians, but recited with equal 
fervor all the songs with which true patriotism 
has inspired German poets. Perhaps this 
delight in Germanism went too far in* many 
respects; it fostered hatred and scorn of every- 
thing "foreign," and was the cause of the long 
hair, and cap, pike, and broad shirt collar worn by 
many a pupil. Yet their number was not very 
large, and Ludo, our most intimate friends, and 
I never joined them. 

Barop himself smiled at their "Teutonism" 
but indulged it, and it was stimulated by some 
of the teachers, especially the magnificent 
Zeller, so full of vigor and joy in existence. I 
can still see the gigantic young Swiss, as he 



IN KEILHAU 61 

made the pines tremble with his "Odin, Odin, 
death to the Romans!" 

One of the pupils, Count zur Lippe, whose 
name was Hermann, was called "Arminius," in 
memory of the conqueror of Varus. But these 
were external things. 

On the other hand, how vividly, during the 
history lesson, Langethal, the old warrior of 
1813, described the course of the conflict for 
liberty! 

Friedrich Froebel had also pronounced esteem 
for manual labor to be genuinely and originally 
German, and therefore each pupil was assigned 
a place where he could wield spades and pickaxes, 
roll stones, sow, and reap. 

These occupations were intended to strengthen 
the body, according to Froebel's rules, and 
absorbed the greater part of the hours not 
devoted to instruction. 

Midway up the Dissauberg was the spacious 
wrestling-ground with the shooting-stand, and 
in the courtyard of the institute the gymnasium 
for every spare moment of the winter. There 
fencing was practiced with fleurets (thrusting 
swords), not rapiers, which Barop rightly 
believed had less effect upon developing the 
agility of youthful bodies. Even when boys of 
twelve, Ludo and I, like most of the other pupils, 
had our own excellent rifles, a Christmas gift 
from our mother, and how quickly our keen 



62 IN KEILHAU 

young eyes learned to hit the bull's-eye ! There 
was good swimming in the pond of the institute, 
and skating was practiced there on the frozen 
surface of the neighboring meadow; then we 
had our coasting parties at the "Upper House" 
and down the long slope of the Dissau, the 
climbing and rambling, the wrestling, and jump- 
ing over the backs of comrades, the ditches, 
hedges, and fences, the games of prisoner's base 
which no Keilhau pupil will ever forget, the 
ball-playing and the various games of running 
for which there was always time, although at 
the end of the year we had acquired a sufficient 
amount of knowledge. The stiffest boy who 
came to Keilhau grew nimble, the biceps of the 
veriest weakling enlarged, the most timid nature 
was roused to courage. Indeed, here, if any- 
where, it required courage to be cowardly. 

If Froebel and Langethal had seen in the prin- 
ciple of comradeship the best furtherance of 
discipline, it was proved here; for we formed 
one large family, and if any act really worthy of 
punishment — no mere ebullition of youthful 
spirits — was committed by any of the pupils, 
Barop summoned us all, formed us into a court 
of justice, and we examined into the afifair and 
fixed the penalty ourselves. For dishonorable 
acts, expulsion from the institute; for grave 
offenses, confinement to the room — a punish- 
ment which pledged even us, who imposed it, to 



IN KEILHAU 63 

avoid all intercourse with the culprit for a 
certain length of time. For lighter misde- 
meanors the offender was confined to the 
house or the courtyard. If trivial matters 
were to be censured this Areopagus was not 
convened. 

And we, the judges, were rigid executors of the 
punishment. Barop afterwards told me that he 
was frequently compelled to urge us to be more 
gentle. Old Froebel regarded these meetings as 
means for coming into unity with life. The 
same purpose was served by the form of our 
intercourse with one another, the pedestrian 
excursions, and the many incidents related by 
our teachers of their own lives, especially the 
historical instruction which was connected with 
the history of civilization and so arranged as to 
seek to make us familiar not only with the deeds 
of nations and bloody battles, but with the life 
of the human race. 

In spite of, or on account of, the court of jus- 
tice I have just mentioned, there could be no 
informers among us, for Barop only half listened 
to the accuser, and often sent him harshly from 
the room without summoning the schoolmate 
whom he accused. Besides, we ourselves knew 
how to punish the sycophant so that he 
took good care not to act as tale-bearer a 
second time. 



64 IN KEILHAU 

Manners, and FroebeVs Kindergarten. 

The wives of the teachers had even more to do 
with our deportment than the dancing-master, 
especially Frau Barop and her husband's sister, 
Frau von Born, who had settled in Keilhau on 
account of having her sons educated there. 

The fact that the head-master's daughters 
and several girls, who were friends or relatives of 
his family, shared many of our lessons, also 
contributed essentially to soften the manners of 
the young German savages. 

I mention our "manners" especially because, 
as I afterwards learned, they had been the 
subject of sharp differences of opinion between 
Friedrich Froebel and Langethal, and because 
the arguments of the former are so character- 
istic that I deem them worthy of record. 

There could be no lack of delicacy of feeling 
on the part of the founder of the kindergarten 
system, who had said, "If you are talking with 
any one, and your child comes to ask you about 
anything which interests him, break off your con- 
versation, no matter what may be the rank of 
the person who is speaking to you," and who 
also directed that the child should receive not 
only love but respect. The first postulate shows 
that he valued the demands of the soul far above 
social forms. Thus it happened that during 
the first years of the institute, which he then 
governed himself, he was reproached with pay- 



IN KEILHAU 65 

ing too little attention to the outward forms, 
the "behavior," the manners, of the boys in- 
trusted to his care. His characteristic answer 
was: "I place no value on these forms unless 
they depend upon and express the inner self. 
Where that is thoroughly trained for life and 
work, externals may be left to themselves, and 
will supplement the other." The opponent 
admits this, but declares that the Keilhau 
method, which made no account of outward 
form, may defer this "supplement" in a way 
disastrous to certain pupils. Froebel's answer 
is: "Certainly, a wax pear can be made much 
more quickly and is just as beautiful as those on 
the tree, which require a much longer time to 
ripen. But the wax pear is only to look at, can 
barely be touched, far less could it afford refresh- 
ment to the thirsty and the sick. It is empty — a 
mere nothing! The child's nature, it is said, 
resembles wax. Very well, we don't grudge wax 
fruits to any one who likes them. But nothing 
must be expected from them if we are ill and 
thirsty; and what is to become of them when 
temptations and trials come, and to whom do 
they not come? Our educational products must 
mature slowly, but thoroughly, to genuine 
human beings whose inner selves will be de- 
ficient in no respect. Let the tailor provide for 
the clothes." 

Froebel himself was certainly very careless in 



66 IN KEILHAU 

the choice of his. The long cloth coat in which 
I always saw him was fashioned by the village 
tailor, and the old gentleman probably liked the 
garment because half a dozen children hung by 
the tails when he crossed the courtyard. It 
needed to be durable; but the well-fitting coats 
worn by Barop and Langethal were equally so, 
and both men believed that the good gardener 
should also care for the form of the fruit he 
cultivates, because, when ripe, it is more valuable 
if it looks well. They, too, cared nothing for wax 
fruits; nay, did not even consider them, because 
they did not recognize them as fruit at all. 

Froebel's conversion was delayed, but after 
his marriage it was all the more thorough. The 
choice of this intellectual and kindly natured 
man, who set no value on the external forms of 
life, was, I might say, "naturally" a very ele- 
gant woman, a native of Berlin, the widow of 
the Kriegsrath Hof meister. She speedily opened 
Froebel's eyes to the aesthetic and artistic ele- 
ment in the lives of the boys intrusted to his 
care — the element to which Langethal, from the 
time of his entrance into the institution, had 
directed his attention. 

So in Keilhau, too, woman was to pave the 
way to greater refinement. 

This had occurred long before our entrance 
into the institution. Froebel did not allude to 
wax pears now when he saw the pupils well 



IN KEILHAU 67 

dressed and courteous in manner; nay, after- 
wards, in establishing the kindergarten, he 
praised and sought to utilize the comprehensive 
influence upon humanity of "woman," the 
guardian of lofty morality. Wives and mothers 
owe him as great a debt of gratitude as children, 
and should never forget the saying, "The 
mother's heart alone is the true source of the 
welfare of the child, and the salvation of human- 
ity. The fundamental necessity of the hour is 
to prepare this soil for the noble human blossom, 
and render it fit for its mission." 

To meet the need mentioned in this sentence 
the whole labor of the evening of his life was de- 
voted. Amid many cares and in defiance of 
strong opposition he exerted his best powers for 
the realization of his ideal, finding courage to do 
so in the conviction uttered in the saying, "Only 
through the pure hands and full hearts of wives 
and mothers can the kingdom of God become a 
reaUty." 

Unfortunately, I cannot enter more compre- 
hensively here into the details of the kindergarten 
system — it is connected with Keilhau only in so 
far that both were founded by the same man. 
Old Froebel was often visited there by female 
kindergarten teachers and pedagogues who 
wished to learn something of this new institute. 
We called the former " Schakelinen " ; the latter, 
according to a popular etymology, "Schakale." 



68 IN KEILHAU 

The odd name bestowed upon the female 
kindergarten teachers was derived, as I learned 
afterwards, from no beast of prey, but from a 
figure in Jean Paul's "Levana," endowed with 
beautiful gifts. Her name is Madame Jacque- 
line, and she was used by the author to give 
expression to his own opinions of female educa- 
tion. Froebel has adopted many suggestions of 
Jean Paul, but the idea of the kindergarten arose 
from his own unhappy childhood. He wished to 
make the first five years of life, which to him had 
been a chain of sorrows, happy and fruitful to 
children — especially to those who, like him, 
were motherless. 

Sullen tempers, the rod, and the strictest, 
almost cruel, constraint had overshadowed his 
childhood, and now his effort was directed to- 
wards having the whole world of little people 
join joyously in his favorite cry, "Friede, 
Freude, Freiheit!" (Peace, Pleasure, Liberty!) 
which corresponds with the motto of the Jahn 
gymnasium, "Frisch, Fromm, Frohlich, Frei." 

He also desired to utiHze for public instruction 
the educational talents which woman undoubt- 
edly possesses. 

As in his youth, shoulder to shoulder with 
Pestalozzi, he had striven to rear growing boys 
in a motherly fashion to be worthy men, he now 
wished to turn to account, for the benefit of the 
whole wide circle of younger children, the trait 



IN KEILHAU 69 

of maternal solicitude which exists in every 
woman. Women were to be trained for teachers, 
and the places where children received their first 
instruction were to resemble nurseries as closely 
as possible. He also desired to see the maternal 
tone prevail in this instruction. 

He, through whose whole life had run the echo 
of the Saviour's words, "Suffer little children to 
come unto me," understood the child's nature 
and knew that its impulse to play must be used, 
in order to afford it suitable future nourishment 
for the mind and soul. 

The instruction, the activity, and the move- 
ments of the child should be associated with the 
things which most interest him, and meanwhile 
it should be constantly employed in some 
creative occupation adapted to its intelligence. 

If, for instance, butter was spoken of, by the 
help of suitable motions the cow was milked, the 
milk was poured into a pan and skimmed, the 
cream was churned, the butter was made into 
pats and finally sent to market. Then came the 
payment, which required little accounts. When 
the game was over, a different one followed, 
perhaps something which rendered the little 
hands skillful by preparing fine weaving from 
strips of paper; for Froebel had perceived that 
change brought rest. 

Every kindergarten should have a small 
garden, to afford an opportunity to watch the 



70 IN KEILHAU 

development of the plants, though only one at a 
time — for instance, the bean. By watching the 
clouds in the sky he directed the childish intel- 
ligence to the rivers, seas, and circulation of 
moisture. In the autumn the observation of the 
chrysalis state of insects was connected with 
that of the various stages of their existence. 

In this way the child can be guided in its play 
to a certain creative activity, rendered familiar 
with the life of Nature, the claims of the house- 
hold, the toil of the peasants, mechanics, etc., 
and at the same time increase its dexterity in 
using its fingers and the suppleness of its body. 
It learns to play, to obey, and to submit to the 
rules of the school, and is protected from the 
contradictory orders of unreasonable mothers 
and nurses. 

Women and girls, too, M^ere benefited by the 
kindergarten. 

Mothers, whose time, inclination, or talents, 
forbade them to devote sufficient time to the 
child, were relieved by the kindergarten. Girls 
learned, as if in a preparatory school of future 
wife and motherhood, how to give the little one 
what it needed, and, as Froebel expresses it, to 
become the mediators between Nature and mind. 

Yet even this enterprise, the outcome of pure 
love for the most innocent and harmless crea- 
tures, was prohibited and persecuted as perilous 
to the state under Frederick William IV, during 



IN KEILHAU 71 

the period of the reaction which followed the 
insurrection of 1848. 

THE FOUNDERS OF THE KEILHAU INSTITUTE, AND 
A GLIMPSE AT THE HISTORY OF THE SCHOOL 

I was well acquainted with the three founders 
of our institute — Friedrich Froebel, Middendorf , 
and Langethal — and the two latter were my 
teachers. Froebel was decidedly "the master 
who planned it." 

When we came to Keilhau he was already 
sixty-six years old, a man of lofty stature, with 
a face which seemed to be carved with a dull 
knife out of brown wood. 

His long nose, strong chin, and large ears, be- 
hind which the long locks, parted in the middle, 
were smoothly brushed, would have rendered 
him positively ugly, had not his "Come, let us 
live for our children" beamed so invitingly in his 
clear eyes. People did not think whether he was 
handsome or not; his features bore the impress 
of his intellectual power so distinctly that the 
first glance revealed the presence of a remarkable 
man. 

Yet I must confess — and his portrait agrees 
with my memory — that his face by no means sug- 
gested the idealist and man of feeling; it seemed 
rather expressive of shrewdness, and to have 
been lined and worn by severe conflicts concern- 
ing the most diverse interests. But his voice 



72 IN KEILHAU 

and his glance were unusually winning, and his 
power over the heart of the child was limitless. 
A few words were sufficient to win completely 
the shyest boy whom he desired to attract; and 
thus it happened that, even when he had been 
with us only a few weeks, he was never seen 
crossing the courtyard without a group of the 
younger pupils hanging to his coat-tails and 
clasping his hands and arms. 

Usually they were persuading him to tell 
stories, and when he condescended to do so, older 
ones flocked around him too, and they were 
never disappointed. What fire, what animation 
the old man had retained ! We never called him 
anything but "Oheim." The word "Onkel" he 
detested as foreign, because it was derived from 
"avunculus" and "oncle." With the high 
appreciation he had of "Xante" — whom he 
termed, next to the mother, the most important 
factor of education in the family — our "Oheim" 
was probably specially agreeable to him. 

He was thoroughly a self-made man. The son 
of a pastor in Oberweissbach, in Thuringia, he 
had had a dreary childhood; for his mother died 
young, and he soon had a stepmother, who 
treated him with the utmost tenderness until 
her own children were born. Then an inde- 
scribably sad time began for the neglected boy, 
whose dreamy temperament vexed even his own 
father. Yet in this solitude his love for Nature 



IN KEILHAU 73 

awoke. He studied plants, animals, minerals; 
and while his young heart vainly longed for love, 
he would have gladly displayed affection himself, 
if his timidity would have permitted him to do 
so. His family, seeing him prefer to dissect the 
bones of some animal rather than to talk with 
his parents, probably considered him a very 
unlovable child when they sent him, in his tenth 
year, to school in the city of Ilm. 

He was received into the home of the pastor, 
his uncle Hoffman, whose mother-in-law, who 
kept the house, treated him in the most cordial 
manner, and helped him to conquer the diffidence 
acquired during the solitude of the first years of 
his childhood. This excellent woman first made 
him familiar with the maternal feminine solici- 
tude, closer observation of which afterwards led 
him, as well as Pestalozzi, to a reform of the 
system of educating youth. 

In his sixteenth year he went to a forester for 
instruction, but did not remain long. Meantime 
he had gained some mathematical knowledge, 
and devoted himself to surveying. By this and 
similar work he earned a living, until, at the end 
of seven years, he went to Frankfort-on-the- 
Main to learn the rudiments of building. There 
Fate brought him into contact with the peda- 
gogue Gruner, a follower of Pestalozzi's method, 
and this experienced man, after their first 
conversation, exclaimed: 



74 IN KEILHAU 

"You must become a schoolmaster!" 

I have often noticed in hfe that a word at the 
right time and place has sufficed to give the 
destiny of a human being a different turn, and 
the remark of the Frankfort educator fell into 
Froebel's soul like a spark. He now saw his real 
profession clearly and distinctly before him. 

The restless years of wandering, during which, 
unloved and scarcely heeded, he had been thrust 
from one place to another, had awakened in his 
warm heart a longing to keep others from the 
same fate. He, who had been guided by no kind 
hand and felt miserable and at variance with 
himself, had long been ceaselessly troubled by 
the problem of how the young human plant 
could be trained to harmony with itself and to 
sturdy industry. Gruner showed him that 
others were already devoting their best powers 
to solve it, and offered him an opportunity to try 
his ability in his model school. 

Froebel joyfully accepted this offer, cast aside 
every other thought, and, with the enthusiasm 
peculiar to him, threw himself into the new call- 
ing in a manner which led Gruner to praise the 
"fire and life" he understood how to awaken in 
his pupils. He also left it to Froebel to arrange 
the plan of instruction which the Frankfort 
Senate wanted for the "model school," and 
succeeded in keeping him two years in his 
institution. 



IN KEILHAU 75 

When a certain Frau von Holzhausen was 
looking for a man who would have the ability to 
lead her spoiled sons into the right path, and 
Froebel had been recommended, he separated 
from Gruner and performed his task with rare 
fidelity and a skill bordering upon genius. The 
children, who were physically puny, recovered 
under his care, and the grateful mother made 
him their private tutor from 1807 till 1810. He 
chose Verdun, where Pestalozzi was then living, 
as his place of residence, and made himself 
thoroughly familiar with his method of educa- 
tion. As a whole, he could agree with him; but, 
as has already been mentioned, in some respects 
he went further than the Swiss reformer. He 
himself called these years his "university course 
as a pedagogue," but they also furnished him 
with the means to continue the studies in natural 
history which he had commenced in Jena. He 
had laid aside for this purpose part of his salary 
as tutor, and was permitted, from 1810 to 1812, 
to complete in Gottingen his astronomical and 
mineralogical studies. Yet the wish to try his 
powers as a pedagogue never deserted him ; and 
when, in 1812, the position of teacher in the 
Plamann Institute in Berlin was offered him, he 
accepted it. During his leisure hours he devoted 
himself to gymnastic exercises, and even late in 
Hfe his eyes sparkled when he spoke of his friend, 
old Jahn, and the political elevation of Prussia. 



76 IN KEILHAU 

When the summons "To my People" called 
the German youth to war, Froebel had already 
entered his thirty-first year, but this did not 
prevent his resigning his office and being one of 
the first to take up arms. He went to the field 
with the Lutzow Jagers, and soon after made 
the acquaintance among his comrades of the 
theological students Langethal and Middendorf. 
When, after the Peace of Paris, the young 
friends parted, they vowed eternal fidelity, and 
each solemnly promised to obey the other's 
summons, should it ever come. As soon as 
Froebel took off the dark uniform of the black 
Jagers he received a position as curator of the 
museum of mineralogy in the Berlin University, 
which he filled so admirably that the position of 
Professor of Mineralogy was offered to him from 
Sweden. But he declined, for another vocation 
summoned him which duty and inclination for- 
bade him to refuse. 

His brother, a pastor in the Thuringian village 
of Griesheim on the Ilm, died, leaving three sons 
who needed an instructor. The widow wished 
her brother-in-law Friedrich to fill this office, 
and another brother, a farmer in Osterode, 
wanted his two boys to join the trio. When 
Froebel, in the spring of 1817, resigned his posi- 
tion, his friend Langethal begged him to take 
his brother Eduard as another pupil, and thus 
Pestalozzi's enthusiastic disciple and comrade 



IN KEILHAU 77 

found his dearest wish fulfilled. He was now 
the head of his own school for boys, and these 
first six pupils — as he hoped with the confidence 
in the star of success peculiar to so many men of 
genius — must soon increase to twenty. Some of 
these boys were specially gifted: one became 
the scholar and politician Julius Froebel, who 
belonged to the Frankfort Parliament of 1848, 
and another the Jena Professor of Botany, 
Eduard Langethal. 

The new principal of the school could not 
teach alone, but he only needed to remind his old 
army comrade, Middendorf, of his promise, to 
induce him to interrupt his studies in BerHn, 
which were nearly completed, and join him. He 
also had his eye on Langethal, if his hope should 
be fulfilled. He knew what a treasure he would 
possess for his object in this rare man. 

There was great joy in the little Griesheim 
circle, and the Thuringian (Froebel) did not 
regret for a moment that he had resigned his 
secure position; but the Westphalian (Midden- 
dorf) saw here the realization of the ideal which 
Froebel's kindling words had impressed upon 
his soul beside many a watch-fire. 

The character of the two men is admirably 
described in the following passage from a letter 
of "the oldest pupil": 

"Both had seen much of the serious side of 
life, and returned from the war with the higher 



78 IN KEILHAU 

inspiration which is hallowed by deep religious 
feeling. The idea of devoting their powers with 
self-denial and sacrifice to the service of their 
native land had become a fixed resolution; the 
devious paths which so many men entered were 
far from their thoughts. The youth, the young 
generation of their native land, were alone 
worthy of their efforts. They meant to train 
them to a harmonious development of mind and 
body; and upon these young people their pure 
spirit of patriotism exerted a vast influence. 
When we recall the mighty power which Froebel 
could exercise at pleasure over his fellow men, 
and especially over children, we shall deem it 
natural that a child suddenly transported into 
this circle could forget its past." 

When I entered it, though at that time it was 
much modified and established on firm founda- 
tions, I met with a similar experience. It was 
not only the open air, the forest, the life in 
Nature which so captivated new arrivals at 
Keilhau, but the moral earnestness and the ideal 
aspiration which consecrated and ennobled life. 
Then, too, there was that "nerve-strengthen- 
ing" patriotism which pervaded everything, 
filling the place of the superficial philanthropy 
of the Basedow system of education. 

But Froebel's influence was soon to draw, as if 
by magnetic power, the man who had formed an 
alliance with him amid blood and steel, and whg 



IN KEILHAU 79 

was destined to lend the right soHdity to the 
newly erected structure of the institute — I mean 
Heinrich Langethal, the most beloved and 
influential of my teachers, who stood beside 
Froebel's inspiring genius and Middendorf's 
lovable warmth of feeling as the character, and 
at the same time the fully developed and trained 
intellect, whose guidance was so necessary to 
the institute. 

The life of this rare teacher can be followed 
step by step from the first years of his childhood 
in his autobiography and many other docu- 
ments, but I can only attempt here to sketch in 
broad outlines the character of the man whose 
influence upon my whole inner life has been, up 
to the present hour, a decisive one. 

The recollection of him makes me inclined to 
agree with the opinion to which a noble lady 
sought to convert me — namely, that our lives 
are far more frequently directed into a certain 
channel by the influence of an unusual person- 
ality than by events, experiences, or individual 
reflections. 

Langethal was my teacher for several years. 
When I knew him he was totally blind, and his 
eyes, which are said to have flashed so brightly 
and boldly on the foe in war, and gazed so 
winningly into the faces of friends in time of 
peace, had lost their luster. But his noble 
features seemed transfigured by the cheerful 



80 IN KEILHAU 

earnestness which is pecuHar to the old man, 
who, even though only with the eye of the mind, 
looks back upon a well-spent, worthy life, and 
who does not fear death, because he knows that 
God who leads all to the goal allotted by Nature 
destined him also for no other. His tall figure 
could vie with Barop's, and his musical voice 
was unusually deep. It possessed a resistless 
power when, excited himself, he desired to fill 
our young souls with his own enthusiasm. The 
blind old man, who had nothing more to com- 
mand and direct, moved through our merry, 
noisy life like a silent admonition to good and 
noble things. Outside of the lessons he never 
raised his voice for orders or censure, yet we 
obediently followed his signs. To be allowed to 
lead him was an honor and pleasure. He made 
us acquainted with Homer, and taught us 
ancient and modern history. To this day I 
rejoice that not one of us ever thought of using 
a pons asinorum, or copied passage, though he 
was perfectly sightless, and we were obliged to 
translate to him and learn by heart whole sec- 
tions of the Iliad. To have done so would have 
seemed as shameful as the pillage of an unguarded 
sanctuary or the abuse of a wounded hero. 

And he certainly was one ! 

We knew this from his comrades in the war 
and his stories of 1813, which were at once so 
vivid and so modest. 



IN KEILHAU 81 

When he explained Homer or taught ancient 
history a special fervor animated him; for he 
was one of the chosen few whose eyes were 
opened by destiny to the full beauty and sub- 
limity of ancient Greece. 

I have listened at the university to many a 
famous interpreter of the Hellenic and Roman 
poets, and many a great historian, but not one 
of them ever gave me so distinct an impression 
of living with the ancients as Heinrich Langethal. 
There was something akin to them in his pure, 
lofty soul, ever thirsting for truth and beauty, 
and, besides, he had graduated from the school 
of a most renowned teacher. 

The outward aspect of the tall old man was 
eminently aristocratic, yet his birthplace was 
the house of a plain though prosperous mechanic. 
He was born at Erfurt, in 1792. When very 
young his father, a man unusually sensible and 
well-informed for his station in life, intrusted 
him with the education of a younger brother, 
the one who, as I have mentioned, afterwards 
became a professor at Jena, and the boy's prog- 
ress was so rapid that other parents had 
requested to have their sons share the hours of 
instruction. 

After completing his studies at the grammar 
school he wanted to go to Berlin, for, though the 
once famous university still existed in Erfurt, it 
had greatly deteriorated. His description of it 



82 IN KEILHAU 

is half lamentable, half amusing, for at that 
time it was attended by thirty students, for 
whom seventy professors were employed. Never- 
theless, there were many obstacles to be sur- 
mounted ere he could obtain permission to 
attend the Berlin University; for the law 
required every native of Erfurt, who intended 
afterwards to aspire to any office, to study at 
least two years in his native city — at that time 
French. But, in defiance of all hindrances, he 
found his way to Berlin, and in 1811 was entered 
in the university just established there as the 
first student from Erfurt. He wished to devote 
himself to theology, and Neander, De Wette, 
Marheineke, Schleiermacher, etc., must have 
exerted a great power of attraction over a young 
man who desired to pursue that study. 

At the latter's lectures he became acquainted 
with Middendorf. At first he obtained little 
from either. Schleiermacher seemed to him too 
temporizing and obscure. "He makes veils."* 
He thought the young Westphalian, at their 
first meeting, merely "a nice fellow." But in 
time he learned to understand the great theolo- 
gian, and the "favorite teacher" noticed him 
and took him into his house. 

But first Fichte, and then Friedrich August 
Wolf, attracted him far more powerfully than 
Schleiermacher. Whenever he spoke of Wolf 

* A play upon the name, which means veil-maker. 



IN KEILHAU 83 

his calm features glowed and his blind eyes 
seemed to sparkle. He owed all that was best 
in him to the great investigator, who sharpened 
his pupil's appreciation of the exhaustless store 
of lofty ideas and the magic of beauty contained 
in classic antiquity, and had he been allowed to 
follow his own inclination, he would have turned 
his back on theology, to devote all his energies 
to the pursuit of philology and archeology. 

The Homeric question which Wolf had pro- 
pounded in connection with Goethe, and which 
at that time stirred the whole learned world, 
had also moved Langethal so deeply that, even 
when an old man, he enjoyed nothing more than 
to speak of it to us and make us familiar with 
the pros and cons which rendered him an up- 
holder of his revered teacher. He had been 
allowed to attend the lectures on the first four 
books of the Iliad, and — I have living witnesses 
of the fact — he knew them all verse by verse, 
and corrected us when we read or recited them 
as if he had the copy in his hand. 

True, he refreshed his naturally excellent 
memory by having them all read aloud. I shall 
never forget his joyous mirth as he listened to my 
delivery of Wolf's translation of Aristophanes's 
Acharnians; but I was pleased that he selected 
me to supply the dear blind eyes. Whenever he 
called me for this purpose he already had the 
book in the side pocket of his long coat, and when 



84 IN KEILHAU 

beckoning significantly, he cried, "Come, Bear," 
I knew what was before me, and would have 
gladly resigned the most enjoyable game, though 
he sometimes had books read which were by no 
means easy for me to understand. I was then 
fourteen or fifteen years old. 

Need I say that it was my intercourse with 
this man which implanted in my heart the love 
of ancient days that has accompanied me 
throughout my life? 

The elevation of the Prussian nation led 
Langethal also from the university to the war. 
Rumor first brought to Berlin the tidings of the 
destruction of the great army on the icy plains 
of Russia; then its remnants, starving, worn, 
ragged, appeared in the capital; and the street- 
boys, who not long before had been forced by 
the French soldiers to clean their boots, now 
with little generosity — they were only "street- 
boys" — shouted sneeringly, "Say, mounseer, 
want your boots blacked?" 

Then came the news of the convention of 
York, and at last the irresolute king put an end 
to the doubts and delays which probably stirred 
the blood of every one who is familiar with 
Droysen's classic "Life of Field-Marshal York." 
From Breslau came the summons "To my 
People," which, like a warm spring wind, melted 
the ice and woke in the hearts of the German 
youth a matchless budding and blossoming. 



IN KEILHAU 85 

The snowdrops which bloomed during those 
March days of 1813 ushered in the long-desired 
day of freedom, and the call "To arms ! " found 
the loudest echo in the hearts of the students. 
It stirred the young, yet even in those days 
circumspect, Langethal, too, and showed him his 
duty. But difficulties confronted him; for 
Pastor Ritschel, a native of Erfurt, to whom he 
confided his intention, warned him not to write 
to his father. Erfurt, his own birthplace, was 
still under French rule, and were he to com- 
municate his plan in writing and the letter 
should be opened in the "black room," with 
other suspicious mail matter, it might cost the 
life of the man whose son was preparing to 
commit high treason by fighting against the 
ruler of his country — Napoleon, the Emperor of 
France. 

"Where will you get the uniform, if your 
father won't help you, and you want to join the 
black Jiigers?" asked the pastor, and received 
the answer: 

"The cape of my cloak will supply the 
trousers. I can have a red collar put on my 
cloak, my coat can be dyed black and turned 
into a uniform, and I have a hanger." 

"That's right!" cried the worthy minister, 
and gave his young friend ten thalers. 

Middendorf, too, reported to the Lutzow 
Jagers at once, and so did the son of Professor 



86 IN KEILHAU 

Bellermann, and their mutual friend Bauer, 
spite of his delicate health, which seemed to unfit 
him for any exertion. 

They set off on the 11th of April, and while 
the spring was budding alike in the outside 
world and in young breasts, a new flower of 
friendship expanded in the hearts of these three 
champions of the same sacred cause; for Lan- 
gethal and Middendorf found their Froebel. 
This was in Dresden, and the league formed 
there was never to be dissolved. They kept 
their eyes fixed steadfastly on the ideals of 
youth, until in old age the sight of all three 
failed. Part of the blessings which were promised 
to the nation when they set forth to battle they 
were permitted to see seven lustra later, in 1848, 
but they did not live to experience the realization 
of their fairest youthful dream, the union of 
Germany. 

I must deny myself the pleasure of describing 
the battles and the marches of the Lutzow corps, 
which extended to Aachen and Oudenarde; but 
will mention here that Langethal rose to the 
rank of sergeant, and had to perform the duties 
of a first lieutenant; and that, towards the end 
of the campaign, Middendorf was sent with 
Lieutenant Reil to induce Bliicher to receive 
the corps in his vanguard. The old commander 
gratified their wish; they had proved their 
fitness for the post when they won the victory 



IN KEILHAU 87 

at the Gohrde, where two thousand Frenchmen 
were killed and as many more taken prisoners. 
The sight of the battle-field had seemed unendur- 
able to the gentle nature of Middendorf. He 
had formed a poetical idea of the campaign as an 
expedition against the hereditary foe. Now 
that he had confronted the bloodstained face of 
war with all its horrors, he fell into a state of 
melancholy from which he could scarcely rouse 
himself. 

After this battle the three friends were 
quartered in Castle Gohrde, and there enjoyed 
a delightful season of rest after months of severe 
hardships. Their corps had been used as the 
extreme vanguard against Davoust's force, 
which was thrice their superior in numbers, and 
in consequence they were subjected to great 
fatigues. They had almost forgotten how it 
seemed to sleep in a bed and eat at a table. One 
night march had followed another. They had 
often seized their food from the kettles and eaten 
it at the next stopping-place, but all was cheer- 
fully done; the light-heartedness of youth did 
not vanish from their enthusiastic hearts. 
There was even no lack of intellectual aliment, 
for a little field-library had been established by 
the exchange of books. Langethal told us of his 
night's rest in a ditch, which was to entail 
disastrous consequences. Utterly exhausted, 
sleep overpowered him in the midst of a pouring 



88 IN KEILHAU 

rain, and when he awoke he discovered that he 
was up to his neck in water. His damp bed — 
the ditch — had gradually filled, but the sleep 
was so profound that even the rising moisture 
had not roused him. The very next morning he 
was attacked with a disease of the eyes, to which 
he attributed his subsequent blindness. 

On the 26th of August there was a prospect of 
improvement in the condition of the corps. 
Davoust had sent forty wagons of provisions to 
Hamburg, and the men were ordered to capture 
them. The attack was successful, but at what 
a price! Theodor Korner, the noble young poet 
whose songs will commemorate the deeds of the 
Lutzow corps so long as German men and boys 
sing his "Thou Sword at my Side," or raise 
their voices in the refrain of the Lutzow Jagers* 
song: 

"Do you ask the name of yon reckless band? 
'Tis Lutzow's black troopers dashing swift 
through the land!" 

Langethal first saw the body of the author of 
"Lyre and Sword" and "Zriny" under an oak 
at Wobbelin; but he was to see it once more 
under quite difTerent circumstances. He has 
mentioned it in his autobiography, and I have 
heard him describe several times his visit to the 
corpse of Theodor Korner. 

He had been quartered in Wobbelin, and 



IN KEILHAU 89 

shared his room with an Oberjager von Behren- 
horst, son of the postmaster-general in Dessau, 
who had taken part in the battle of Jena as a 
young lieutenant and returned home with a 
darkened spirit. At the summons "To my 
People," he had enlisted at once as a private 
soldier in the Lutzow corps, where he rose 
rapidly to the rank of Oberjager. During the 
war he had often met Langethal and Mid- 
dendorf; but the quiet, reserved man, pre- 
maturely grave for his years, attached himself 
so closely to Korner that he needed no other 
friend. 

After the death of the poet on the 26th of 
August, 1813, he moved silently about as though 
completely crushed. On the night which 
followed the 27th he invited his roommate 
Langethal to go with him to the body of his 
friend. Both went first to the village church, 
where the dead Jagers lay in two long black 
rows. A solemn stillness pervaded the little 
house of God, which had become during this 
night the abode of death, and the nocturnal 
visitors gazed silently at the pallid, rigid features 
of one lifeless young form after another, but 
without finding him whom they sought. 

During this mute review of corpses it seemed 
to Langethal as if Death were singing a deep, 
heartrending choral, and he longed to pray for 
these young, crushed human blossoms; but his 



90 IN KEILHAU 

companion led the way into the guard's little 
room. There lay the poet, "the radiance of an 
angel on his face," though his body bore many 
traces of the fury of the battle. Deeply moved, 
Langethal stood gazing down upon the form of 
the man who had died for his native land, while 
Behrenhorst knelt on the floor beside him, 
silently giving himself up to the anguish of his 
soul. He remained in this attitude a long time, 
then suddenly started up, threw his arms 
upward, and exclaimed, "Korner, I'll follow 
you!" 

With these words Behrenhorst darted out of 
the little room into the darkness; and a few 
weeks after he, too, had fallen for the sacred 
cause of his native land. 

They had seen another beloved comrade 
perish in the battle of Gohrde, a handsome 
young man of delicate figure and an unusually 
reserved manner. 

Middendorf, with whom he — his name was 
Prohaska — had been on more intimate terms 
than the others, once asked him, when he 
timidly avoided the girls and women who cast 
kindly glances at him, if his heart never beat 
faster, and received the answer, " I have but one 
love to give, and that belongs to our native 
land." 

While the battle was raging, Middendorf was 
fighting close beside his comrade. When the 



IN KEILHAU 91 

enemy fired a volley the others stooped, but 
Prohaska stood erect, exclaiming, when he was 
warned, "No bowing! I'll make no obeisance to 
the French!" 

A few minutes after, the brave soldier, stricken 
by a bullet, fell on the greensward. His friends 
bore him off the field, and Prohaska — Eleonore 
Prohaska — proved to be a girl ! 

While in Castle Gohrde, Froebel talked with 
his friends about his favorite plan, which he 
had already had in view in Gottingen, of estab- 
lishing a school for boys, and while developing 
his educational ideal to them and at the same 
time mentioning that he had passed his thirtieth 
birthday, and alluding to the postponement of 
his plan by the war, he exclaimed, to explain 
why he had taken up arms: 

"How can I train boys whose devotion I 
claim, unless I have proved by my own deeds 
how a man should show devotion to the general 
welfare?" 

These words made a deep impression upon the 
two friends, and increased Middendorf's enthu- 
siastic reverence for the older comrade, whose 
experiences and ideas had opened a new world 
to him. 

The Peace of Paris, and the enrollment of the 
Lutzow corps in the line, brought the trio back 
to Berlin to civil life. 

There also each frequently sought the others, 



92 IN KEILHAU 

until, in the spring of 1817, Froebel resigned the 
permanent position in the Bureau of Mineralogy 
in order to establish his institute. 

Middendorf had been bribed by the saying of 
his admired friend that he "had found the unity 
of Hfe." It gave the young philosopher food for 
thought, and, because he felt that he had vainly 
sought this unity and was dissatisfied, he hoped 
to secure it through the society of the man who 
had become everything to him. His wish was 
fulfilled, for as an educator he grew as it were 
into his own motto, "Lucid, genuine, and true 
to Hfe." 

Middendorf gave up little when he followed 
Froebel. 

The case was different with Langethal. He 
had entered as a tutor the Bendemann house- 
hold at Charlottenburg, where he found a second 
home. He taught with brilliant success children 
richly gifted in mind and heart, whose love he 
won. It was "a glorious family" which per- 
mitted him to share its rich social life, and in 
whose highly gifted circle he could be sure of 
finding warm sympathy in his intellectual 
interests. Protected from all external anxieties, 
he had under their roof ample leisure for indus- 
trious labor and also for intercourse with his 
own friends. 

In July, 1817, he passed the last examination 
with the greatest distinction, receiving the "very 



IN KEILHAU 93 

good," rarely bestowed; and a brilliant career 
lay before him. 

Directly after this success three pulpits were 
offered to him, but he accepted neither, because 
he longed for rest and quiet occupation. 

The summons from Froebel to devote himself 
to his infant institute, where Langethal had 
placed his younger brother, also reached him. 
The little school moved on St. John's Day, 1817, 
from Griesheim to Keilhau, where the widow of 
Pastor Froebel had been offered a larger farm. 
The place which she and her children's teacher 
found was wonderfully adapted to Froebel's 
purpose, and seemed to promise great advantages 
both to the pupils and to the institute. There 
was much building and arranging to be accom- 
plished, but means to do so were obtained, and 
the first pupil described very amusingly the 
entrance into the new home, the furnishing, the 
discovery of all the beauties and advantages 
which we found as an old possession in Keilhau, 
and the endeavor, so characteristic of Midden- 
dorf, to adapt even the less attractive points to 
his own poetic ideas. 

Only the hours of instruction fared badly, and 
Froebel felt that he needed a man of fully devel- 
oped strength in order to give the proper 
foundation to the instruction of the boys who 
were intrusted to his care. He knew a man of 
this stamp in the student F. A. Wolf, whose 



94 IN KEILHAU 

talent for teaching had been admirably proved 
in the Bendemann family. 

"Langethal," as the first pupil describes him, 
"was at that time a very handsome man of five- 
and-twenty years. His brow was grave, but his 
features expressed kindness of heart, gentleness, 
and benevolence. The dignity of his whole 
bearing was enhanced by the sonorous tones of 
his voice — he retained them until old age — and 
his whole manner revealed manly firmness. 
Middendorf was more pleasing to women, 
Langethal to men. Middendorf attracted those 
who saw, Langethal those who heard him, and 
the confidence he inspired was even more lasting 
than that aroused by Middendorf. 

What marvel that Froebel made every effort 
to win this rare power for the young institute? 
But Langethal declined, to the great vexation of 
Middendorf. Diesterweg called the latter "a St. 
John," but our dear, bUnd teacher added, "And 
Froebel was his Christus." 

The enthusiastic young Westphalian, who had 
once believed he saw in this man every masculine 
virtue, and whose life appeared emblematical, 
patiently accepted everything, and considered 
every one a "renegade" who had ever followed 
Froebel and did not bow implicitly to his will. 
So he was angered by Langethal's refusal. The 
latter had been offered, with brilliant prospects 
for the present and still fairer ones for the future. 



IN KEILHAU 95 

a position as a tutor in Silesia, a place which 
secured him the rest he desired, combined with 
occupation suited to his tastes. He was to share 
the labor of teaching with another instructor, 
who was to take charge of the exact sciences, 
with which he was less familiar, and he was also 
permitted to teach his brother with the young 
Counts Stolberg. 

He accepted, but before going to Silesia he 
wished to visit his Keilhau friends and take his 
brother away with him. He did so, and the 
"diplomacy" with which Froebel succeeded in 
changing the decision of the resolute young man 
and gaining him over to his own interests, is 
really remarkable. It won for the infant 
institute in the person of Langethal — if the 
expression is allowable — the backbone. 

Froebel had sent Middendorf to meet his 
friend, and the latter, on the way, told him of 
the happiness which he had found in his new 
home and occupation. Then they entered 
Keilhau, and the splendid landscape which 
surrounds it needs no praise. 

Froebel received his former comrade with the 
utmost cordiality, and the sight of the robust, 
healthy, merry boys who were lying on the floor 
that evening, building forts and castles with the 
wooden blocks which Froebel had had made for 
them according to his own plan, excited the 
keenest interest. He had come to take his 



96 IN KEILHAU 

brother away; but when he saw him, among 
other happy companions of his own age, complete 
the finest structure of all — a Gothic cathedral 
— it seemed almost wrong to tear the child from 
this circle. 

He gazed sadly at his brother when he came 
to bid him "good-night," and then remained 
alone with Froebel. The latter was less talkative 
than usual, waiting for his friend to tell him of 
the future which awaited him in Silesia. When 
he heard that a second tutor was to relieve 
Langethal of half his work, he exclaimed, with 
the greatest anxiety: 

"You do not know him, and yet intend to 
finish a work of education with him? What 
great chances you are hazarding!" 

The next morning Froebel asked his friend 
what goal in life he had set before him, and 
Langethal replied : 

"Like the apostle, I would fain proclaim the 
gospel to all men according to the best of my 
powers, in order to bring them into close com- 
munion with the Redeemer." 

Froebel answered, thoughtfully: 
' " If you desire that, you must, like the apostles, 
know men. You must be able to enter into the 
life of every one — here a peasant, there a 
mechanic. If you cannot, do not hope for suc- 
cess; your influence will not extend far." 

How wise and convincing the words sounded j 



IN KEILHAU 97 

And Froebel touched the sensitive spot in the 
young minister, who was thoroughly imbued 
with the sacred beauty of his Hfe-task. yet 
certamly knew the Gospels, his classic authors 
and apostolic fathers much better than he did 
the world. 

He thoughtfully followed Froebel, who. with 
Middendorf and the boys, led him up the 
^teiger, the mountain whose summit afforded 
the magnificent view I have described. It was 
the hour when the setting sun pours its most 
exquisite light over the mountains and valleys 
The heart of the young clergyman, tortured by 
anxious doubts, swelled at the sight of this 
magnificence, and Froebel, seeing what was 
passing m his mind, exclaimed: 

"Come, comrade, let us have one of our old 
war-songs." 

The musical "black Jager" of yore willingly 
assented; and how clearly and enthusiastically 
the chorus of boyish voices chimed in! 

When it died away, the older man passed his 
arm around his friend's shoulders, and, pointing 
to the beautiful region lying before them in the 
sunset glow, exclaimed: 

"Why seek so far away what is dose at hand? 
A work IS established here which must be built 
by the hand of God! Implicit devotion and 
sslf-sacnfice are needed." 

While speaking, he gazed steadfastly into his 



98 IN KEILHAU 

friend's tearful eyes, as if he had found his true 
object in life, and when he held out his hand 
Langethal clasped it — he could not help it. 

That very day a letter to the Counts Stolberg 
informed them that they must seek another 
tutor for their sons, and Froebel and Keilhau 
could congratulate themselves on having gained 
their Langethal. 

The management of the school was hencefor- 
ward in the hands of a man of character, while 
the extensive knowledge and the excellent 
method of a well-trained scholar had been 
obtained for the educational department. The 
new institute now prospered rapidly. The 
renown of the fresh, healthful life and the able 
tuition of the pupils spread far beyond the limits 
of Thuringia. The material difficulties with 
which the head-master had had to struggle after 
the erection of the large new buildings were also 
removed when Froebel's prosperous brother in 
Osterode decided to take part in the work and 
move to Keilhau. He understood farming, and, 
by purchasing more land and woodlands, 
transformed the peasant holding into a con- 
siderable estate. 

When Froebel's restless spirit drew him to 
Switzerland to undertake new educational enter- 
prises, and some one was needed who could 
direct the business management, Barop, the 
steadfast man of whom I have already spoken, 



IN KEILHAU 99 

was secured. Deeply esteemed and sincerely 
beloved, he managed the institute during the 
time that we three brothers were pupils there. 
He had found many things within to arrange on 
a more practical foundation, many without to 
correct : for the long locks of most of the pupils ; 
the circumstance that three Lutzow Jagers, one 
of whom had delivered the oration at a students' 
political meeting, had established the school; 
that Barop had been persecuted as a demagogue 
on account of his connection with a students' 
political society; and, finally, Froebel's relations 
with Switzerland and the liberal educational 
methods of the school, had roused the suspicions 
of the Berlin demagogue-hunters, and therefore 
demagogic tendencies, from which in reality it 
had always held aloof, were attributed to the 
institute. 

Yes, we were free, in so far that everything 
which could restrict or retard our physical and 
mental development was kept away from us, 
and our teachers might call themselves so 
because, with virile energy, they had understood 
how to protect the institute from every injurious 
and narrowing outside influence. The smallest 
and the largest pupil was free, for he was per- 
mitted to be wholly and entirely his natural self, 
so long as he kept within the limits imposed by 
the existing laws. But license was nowhere 
more sternly prohibited than at Keilhau; and 



100 IN KEILHAU 

the deep religious feeling of its head-masters — 
Barop, Langethal, and Middendorf — ought to 
have taught the suspicious spies in Berlin that 
the command, "Render unto Caesar the things 
that are Csesar's," would never be violated here. 
The time I spent in Keilhau was during the 
period of the worst reaction, and I now know 
that our teachers would have sat on the Left in 
the Prussian Landtag; yet we never heard a 
disrespectful word spoken of Frederick William 
IV, and we were instructed to show the utmost 
respect to the prince of the little country of 
Rudolstadt to which Keilhau belonged. Barop, 
spite of his liberal tendencies, was highly 
esteemed by this petty sovereign, decorated 
with an order, and raised to the rank of Coun- 
cillor of Education. From a hundred isolated 
recollections and words which have lingered in 
my memory I have gathered that our teachers 
were liberals in a very moderate way, yet they 
were certainly guilty of "demagogic aspirations" 
in so far as that they desired for their native 
land only what we, thank Heaven, now possess: 
its unity, and a popular representation, by a 
free election of all its states, in a German 
Parliament. What enthusiasm for the Emperor 
William, Bismarck, and Von Moltke, Langethal, 
Middendorf, and Barop would have inspired in 
our hearts had they been permitted to witness 
the great events of 1870 and 1871! 



IN KEILHAU 101 

Besides, politics were kept from us, and this 
had become known in wider circles when we 
entered the institute, for most of the pupils 
belonged to loyal families. Many were sons of 
the higher officials, officers, and landed pro- 
prietors; and as long locks had long since be- 
come the exception, and the Keilhau pupils were 
as well mannered as possible, many noblemen, 
among them chamberlains and other court offi- 
cials, decided to send their boys to the institute. 

The great manufacturers and merchants who 
placed their sons in the institute were also not 
men favorable to revolution, and many of our 
comrades became officers in the German army. 
Others are able scholars, clergymen, and mem- 
bers of Parliament; others again government 
officials, who fill high positions; and others still 
are at the head of large industrial or mercantile 
enterprises. I have not heard of a single indi- 
vidual who has gone to ruin, and of very many 
who have accomplished things really worthy of 
note. But wherever I have met an old pupil of 
Keilhau, I have found in him the same love for 
the institute, have seen his eyes sparkle more 
brightly when we talked of Langethal, Midden- 
dorf, and Barop. ,Not one has turned out a 
sneak or a hypocrite. 

The present institution is said to be an admira- 
ble one; but the "Realschule" of Keilhau, which 
has been forced to abandon its former human- 



102 IN KEILHAD 

istic foundation, can scarcely train to so great 
a variety of callings the boys now intrusted to 
its care. 

IN THE FOREST AND ON THE MOOR 

The little country of Rudolstadt in which Keil- 
hau lies had had its revolution, though it was 
but a small and bloodless one. True, the in- 
surrection had nothing to do with human beings, 
but involved the destruction of living creatures. 
Greater liberty in hunting was demanded. 

This might seem a trivial matter, yet it was of 
the utmost importance to both disputants. The 
wide forests of the country had hitherto been 
the hunting-grounds of the prince, and not a gun 
could be fired there without his permission. To 
give up these "happy hunting-grounds" was a 
severe demand upon the eager sportsman who 
occupied the Rudolstadt throne, and the rustic 
population would gladly have spared him had it 
been possible. 

But the game in Rudolstadt had become a 
veritable torment, which destroyed the husband- 
men's hopes of harvests. The peasant, to save 
his fields from the stags and does which broke 
into them in herds at sunset, tried to keep them 
out by means of clappers and bad odors. I 
have seen and smelled the so-called "French- 
man's oil" with which the posts were smeared, 
that its really diabolical odor — I don't know 



IN KEILHAU 103 

from what horrors it was compounded — might 
preserve the crops. The ornament of the forests 
had become the object of the keenest hate, and 
as soon as — shortly before we entered Keilhau — 
hunting was freely permitted, the peasants gave 
full vent to their rage, set off for the woods with 
the old muskets they had kept hidden in the 
garrets, or other still more primitive weapons, 
and shot or struck down all the game they 
encountered. Roast venison was cheap for 
weeks on Rudolstadt tables, and the pupils had 
many an unexpected pleasure. 

The hunting exploits of the older scholars 
were only learned by us younger ones as secrets, 
and did not reach the teachers' ears until long 
after. But the woods furnished other pleasures 
besides those enjoyed by the sportsman. Every 
ramble through the forest enriched our knowl- 
edge of plants and animals, and I soon knew the 
different varieties of stones also; yet we did not 
suspect that this knowledge was imparted ac- 
cording to a certain system. We were taught as 
it were by stealth, and how many pleasant, 
delicious things attracted us to the class-rooms 
on the wooded heights! 

Vegetation was very abundant in the richly 
watered mountain valley. Our favorite spring 
was the Schaalbach at the foot of the Steiger,* 

* We pupils bought it of the peasant who owned it and 
gave it to Barop. 



104 IN KEILHAU 

because there was a fowling-floor connected 
with it, where I spent many a pleasant evening. 
It could be used only after breeding-time, and 
consisted of a hut built of boughs where the bird- 
catcher lodged. Flowing water rippled over the 
little wooden rods on which the feathered den- 
izens of the woods alighted to quench their 
thirst before going to sleep. When some of them 
— frequently six at a time — had settled on the 
perches in the trough, it was drawn into the hut 
by a rope, a net was spread over the water and 
there was nothing more to do except take the 
captives out. 

The name of the director of this amusement 
was Merbod. He could imitate the voices of all 
the birds, and was a merry, versatile fellow, who 
knew how to do a thousand things, and of whom 
we boys were very fond. 

The peasant Bredernitz often took us to his 
crow-hut, which was a hole in the ground covered 
with boughs and pieces of turf, where the hunters 
lay concealed. The owl, which lured the crows 
and other birds of prey, was fastened on a perch, 
and when they flew up, often in large flocks, to 
tease the old crosspatch which sat blinking 
angrily, they were shot down from loopholes 
which had been left in the hut. The hawks 
which prey upon doves and hares, the crows and 
magpies, can thus easily be decimated. 

We had learned to use our guns in the play- 



IN KEILHAU 105 

ground. The utmost caution was enforced, and 
although, as I have already remarked, we 
handled our own guns when we were only lads of 
twelve years old, I cannot recall a single accident 
which occurred. 

Once, during the summer, there was a Schut- 
zenfest, in which a large wooden eagle was shot 
from the pole. Whoever brought down the last 
splinter became king. This honor once fell to 
my share, and I was permitted to choose a queen. 
I crowned Marie Breimann, a pretty, slender 
young girl from Brunswick, whose Greek profile 
and thick silken hair had captivated my fancy. 
She and Adelheid Barop, the head-master's 
daughter, were taught in our classes, but Marie 
attracted me more strongly than the diUgent 
Keilhau lassies with their beautiful black eyes 
and the other two blooming and graceful West- 
phahan girls who were also schoolmates. But 
the girls occupied a very small place in our lives. 
They could neither wrestle, shoot, nor climb, so 
we gave them little thought, and anything like 
actual flirtation was unknown — we had so many 
better things in our heads. Wrestling and other 
sports threw everything else into the shade. 
Pretty Marie, however, probably suspected 
which of my schoolmates I liked best, and up to 
the time of my leaving the institute I allowed no 
other goddess to rival her. But there were 
plenty of amusements at Keilhau besides bird- 



106 IN KEILHAU 

shooting. I will mention the principal ones 
which came during the year, for to describe 
them in regular order would be impossible. 

Of the longer walks which we took in the 
spring and summer the most beautiful was the 
one leading through Blankenburg to the entrance 
of the Schwarzathal, and thence through the 
lofty, majestically formed group of cliffs at 
whose foot the clear, swift Schwarza flows, 
dashing and foaming, to Schwarzburg. 

How clearly our songs echoed from the granite 
walls of the river valley, and how lively it always 
was at "The Stag," whose landlord possessed a 
certain power of attraction to us boys in his own 
person; for, as the stoutest man in Thuringia, he 
was a feast for the eyes! His jollity equaled his 
corpulence, and how merrily he used to jest with 
us lads! 

Of the shorter expeditions I will mention only 
the two we took most frequently, which led us in 
less than an hour to Blankenburg or Greifen- 
stein, a large ruin, many parts of which were in 
tolerable preservation. It had been the home of 
Count Gunther von Schwarzburg, who paid 
with his life for the honor of wearing the 
German imperial crown a few short months. 

We also enjoyed being sent to the little town 
of Blankenburg on errands, for it was the home 
of our drawing-master, the artist Unger, one of 
those original characters whom we rarely meet 



IN KEILHAU 107 

now. When we knew him, the handsome, 
broad-shouldered man, with his thick red beard, 
looked as one might imagine Odin. Summer 
and winter his dress was a gray woolen jacket, 
into which a short pipe was thrust, and around 
his hips a broad leather belt, from which hung 
a bag containing his drawing materials. He 
cared nothing for public opinion, and, as an 
independent bachelor, desired nothing except 
"to be let alone," for he professed the utmost 
contempt for the corrupt brood yclept "man- 
kind." He never came to our entertainments, 
probably because he would be obliged to wear 
something in place of his woolen jacket, and 
because he avoided women, whom he called 
"the roots of all evil." I still remember how 
once, after emptying the vials of his wrath upon 
mankind, he said, in reply to the question 
whether he included Barop among the iniquitous 
brood, "Why, of course not; he doesn't belong 
to it!" 

There was no lack of opportunity to visit him, 
for a great many persons employed to work for 
the school lived in Blankenburg, and we were 
known to be carefully watched there. 

I remember two memorable expeditions to 
the little town. Once my brother Ludo burned 
his arm terribly during a puppet-show by the 
explosion of some powder provided for the toy 
cannon. 



108 IN KEILHAU 

The poor fellow suffered so severely that I 
could not restrain my tears, and though it was 
dark, and snow lay on the mountains, off I went 
to Blankenburg to get the old surgeon, calling to 
some of my schoolmates at the door to tell 
them of my destination. It was no easy matter 
to wade through the snow; but, fortunately, 
the stars gave me sufficient light to keep in the 
right path as I dashed down the mountain to 
Blankenburg. How often I plunged into ditches 
filled with snow and slid down short descents 
I don't know; but as I write these lines I can 
vividly remember the relief with which I at last 
trod the pavement of the little town. Old 
Wetzel was at home, and a carriage soon con- 
veyed us over the only road to the institute. 
I was not punished. Barop only laid his hand 
on my head, and said, "I am glad you are back 
again. Bear." 

Another trip to Blankenburg entailed re- 
sults far more serious — nay, almost cost me 
my life. 

I was then fifteen, and one Sunday afternoon 
I went with Barop's permission to visit the 
Hamburgers, but on condition that I should 
return by nine o'clock at latest. 

Time, however, slipped by in pleasant conver- 
sation until a later hour, and as thunder clouds 
were rising my host tried to keep me overnight. 
But I thought this would not be allowable, and, 



IN KEILHAU 109 

armed with an umbrella, I set off along the road, 
with which I was perfectly familiar. 

But the storm soon burst, and it grew so dark 
that, except when the Hghtning flashed, I could 
not see my hand before my face. Yet on I went, 
though wondering that the path along which I 
groped my way led upward, until the lightning 
showed me that, by mistake, I had taken the 
road to Greifenstein. I turned back, and while 
feeling my way through the gloom the earth 
seemed to vanish under my feet, and I plunged 
headlong into a viewless gulf — not through 
empty space, however, but a wet, tangled mass 
which beat against my face, until at last there 
was a jerk which shook me from head to foot. 

I no longer fell, but I heard above me the sound 
of something tearing, and the thought darted 
through my mind that I was hanging by my 
trousers. Groping around, I found vine-leaves, 
branches, and lattice-work, to which I clung, 
and tearing away with my foot the cloth which 
had caught on the end of a lath, I again brought 
my head where it should be, and discovered that 
I was hanging on a vine-clad wall. A flash of 
lightning showed me the ground not very far 
below and, by the help of the espalier and the 
vines, I at last stood in a garden. 

Almost by a miracle I escaped with a few 
scratches; but when I afterwards went to look 
at the scene of this disaster cold chills ran down 



110 IN KEILHAU 

my back, for half the distance whence I plunged 
into the garden would have been enough to 
break my neck. 

Our games were similar to those which lads of 
the same age play now, but there were some 
additional ones that could only take place in a 
wooded mountain valley like Keilhau; such, for 
instance, were our Indian games, which engrossed 
us at the time when we were pleased with 
Cooper's "Leather-Stocking," but I need not 
describe them. 

When I was one of the older pupils a party of 
us surprised some "Panzen" — as we called the 
younger ones — one hot afternoon engaged in a 
very singular game of their own invention. 
They had undressed to the skin in the midst of 
the thickest woods and were performing Para- 
dise and the Fall of Man, as they had probably 
just been taught in their religious lesson. For 
the expulsion of Adam and our universal mother 
Eve, the angel — in this case there were two of 
them — used, instead of the flaming sword, stout 
hazel rods, with which they performed their 
part of warders so over-zealously that a quarrel 
followed, which we older ones stopped. 

Thus many bands of pupils invented games of 
their own, but, thank Heaven, rarely devised 
such absurdities. Our later Homeric battles any 
teacher would have witnessed with pleasure. 
Froebel would have greeted them as signs of 



IN KEILHAU 111 

creative imagination and "individual life" in 
the boys. 

SUMMER PLEASURES AND RAMBLES 

Wholly unlike these, genuinely and solely a 
product of Keilhau, was the great battle-game 
which we called Bergwacht, one of my brightest 
memories of those years. 

Long preparations were needed, and these, 
too, were delightful. 

On the wooded plain at the summit of the 
Kolm, a mountain which belonged mainly to the 
institute, war was waged during the summer 
every Saturday evening until far into the night, 
whenever the weather was fine, which does not 
happen too often in Thuringia. 

The whole body of pupils was divided into 
three, afterwards into four sections, each of 
which had its own citadel. After two had de- 
clared war against two others, the battle raged 
until one party captured the strongholds of the 
other. This was done as soon as a combatant 
had set foot on the hearth of a hostile fortress. 

The battle itself was fought with stakes 
blunted at the tops. Every one touched by the 
weapon of an enemy must declare himself a 
prisoner. To admit this, whenever it happened, 
was a point of honor. 

In order to keep all the combatants in action, 
a fourth division was added soon after our 



112 IN KEILHAU 

arrival, and of course it was necessary to build 
a stronghold like the others. This consisted of 
a hut with a stone roof, in which fifteen or 
twenty boys could easily find room and rest, a 
strong wall which protected us up to our fore- 
heads, and surrounded the front of the citadel in 
a semicircle, as well as a large altar-like hearth 
which rose in the midst of the semicircular space 
surrounded by the wall. 

We built this fortress ourselves, except that 
our teacher of handicrafts, the sapper Sabdm, 
sometimes gave us a hint. The first thing was 
to mark out the plan, then with the aid of levers 
pry the rocks out of the fields, and by means of 
a two-wheeled cart convey them to the site 
chosen, fit them neatly together, stuff the 
interstices with moss, and finally put on a roof 
made of pine logs which we felled ourselves, 
earth, moss, and branches. 

How quickly we learned to use the plummet, 
take levels, hew the stone, wield the axes! And 
what a delight it was when the work was finished 
and we saw our own building! Perhaps we 
might not have accomplished it without the 
sapper, but every boy believed that if he were 
cast, like Robinson Crusoe, on a desert island, he 
could build a hut of his own. 

As soon as this citadel was completed, prep- 
arations for the impending battle were made. 
The walls and encircling walls of all were pre- 



IN KEILHAU 113 

pared, and we were drilled in the use of the poles. 
This, too, afforded us the utmost pleasure. 
Touching the head of an enemy was strictly 
prohibited ; yet many a slight wound was given 
while fighting in the gloom of the woods. 

Each of the four Bergwachts had its leader. 
The captain of the first was director of the 
whole game, and instead of a lance wore a 
rapier. I considered it a great honor when 
this dignity was conferred on me. One of its 
consequences was that my portrait was sketched 
by "Old Unger" in the so-called "Bergwacht 
Book," which contained the likenesses of all my 
predecessors. 

During the summer months all eyes, even as 
early as Thursday, were watching the weather. 
When Saturday evening proved pleasant and 
Barop had given his consent, there was great 
rejoicing in the institute, and the morning hours 
must have yielded the teachers little satisfaction. 
Directly after dinner everybody seized his pole 
and the other "Bergwacht" equipments. The 
alliances were formed under the captain's 
guidance. We will say that the contest was to 
begin with the first and third Bergwacht pitted 
against the second and fourth, and be followed 
by another, with the first and second against the 
third and fourth. 

We assembled in the courtyard just before 
sunset. Barop made a little speech, exhorting 



114 IN KEILHAU 

US to fight steadily, and especially to observe all 
the rules and yield ourselves captives as soon as 
an enemy's pole touched us. He never neglected 
on these occasions to admonish us that, should 
our native land ever need the armed aid of her 
sons, we should march to battle as joyously as 
we now did to the Bergwacht, which was to 
train us to skill in her defense. 

Then the procession set off in good order, four 
or six pupils harnessing themselves voluntarily 
to the cart in which the kegs of beer were dragged 
up the Kolm. Off we went, singing merrily, 
and at the top the women were waiting for us 
with a lunch. Then the warriors scattered, the 
fire was lighted on every hearth, the plan of 
battle was discussed, some were sent out to 
reconnoitre, others kept to defend the citadel. 

At last the conflict began. Could I ever for- 
get the scenes in the forest! No Indian tribe on 
the war-path ever strained every sense more 
keenly to watch, surround, and surprise the foe. 
And the hand-to-hand fray! What delight it 
was to burst from the shelter of the thicket and 
touch with our poles two, three, or four of the 
surprised enemies ere they thought of defense! 
And what self-denial it required when — spite of 
the most skillful parry — we felt the touch of the 
pole, to confess it, and be led off as a prisoner! 

Voices and shouts echoed through the woods, 
and the glare of five fires pierced the darkness — 



IN KEILHAU 115 

five — for flames were also blazing where the 
women were cooking the supper. But the light 
was brightest, the shouts of the combatants 
were loudest, in the vicinity of the forts. The 
effort of the besiegers was to spy out unguarded 
places, and occupy the attention of the garrison 
so that a comrade might leap over the wall and 
set his foot on the hearth. The object of the 
garrison was to prevent this. 

What was that? An exulting cry rang through 
the night air. A warrior had succeeded in pene- 
trating the hostile citadel untouched and setting 
his foot on the hearth! 

Two or three times we enjoyed the delight of 
battle; and when towards midnight it closed, we 
threw ourselves — glowing from the strife and 
blackened by the smoke of the hearth fires — 
down on the greensward around the women's 
fire, where boiled eggs and other good things 
were served, and meanwhile the mugs of foam- 
ing beer were passed around the circle. One 
patriotic song after another was sung, and at 
last each Bergwacht withdrew to its citadel and 
lay down on the moss to sleep under the shelter- 
ing roof. Two sentinels marched up and down, 
relieved every half hour until the early dawn of 
the summer Sunday brightened the eastern sky. 
Then "Huup!"— the Keilhau shout which 
summoned us back to the institute — rang out, 
and a hymn, the march back, a bath in the pond, 



116 IN KEILHAU 

and finally the most delicious rest, if good luck 
permitted, on the heaps of hay which had not 
been gathered in. On the Sunday following the 
Bergwacht we were not required to attend 
church, where we should merely have gone to 
sleep. Barop, though usually very strict in the 
observance of religious duties, never demanded 
anything for the sake of mere appearances. 

And the bed of my own planning! It consisted 
of wood and stones, and was covered with a 
thick layer of moss, raised at the head in a slant- 
ing direction. It looked like other beds, but the 
place where it stood requires some description, 
for it was a Keilhau specialty, a favor be- 
stowed by our teachers on the pupils. 

Midway up the slope of the Kolm where our 
citadels stood, on the side facing the institute, 
each boy had a piece of ground where he might 
build, dig, or plant, as he chose. They descended 
from one to another: Ludo's and mine had 
come down from Martin and another pupil who 
left the school at the same time. But I was not 
satisfied with what my predecessors had created. 
I spared the beautiful vine which twined around 
a fir-tree, but in the place of a flower-bed and a 
bench which I found there Ludo and I built a 
hearth, and for myself the bed already men- 
tioned, which my brother of course was permitted 
to occupy with me. 

How many hours I have spent on its soft 



IN KEILHAU 117 

cushions, reading or dreaming or imagining 
things! If I could only remember them as they 
hovered before me, what epics and tales I could 
write ! 

No doubt we ought to be grateful to God for 
this as well as for so many other blessings; but 
why are we permitted to be young only once in 
our lives, only once to be borne aloft on the 
wings of a tireless power of imagination, so 
easily satisfied with ourselves, so full of love, 
faith, and hope, so open to every joy and so 
blind to every care and doubt, and everything 
which threatens to cloud and extinguish the 
sunlight in the soul? 

Dear bed in my plot of ground at Keilhau, you 
ought, in accordance with a remark of Barop, to 
cause me serious self-examination, for he said, 
probably with no thought of my mossy couch, 
"From the way in which the pupils use their 
plots of ground and the things they place in them, 
I can form a very correct opinion of their dis- 
positions and tastes." But you, beloved couch, 
should have the best place in my garden if you 
could restore me but for one half hour the 
dreams which visited me on your gray-green 
pillows, when I was a lad of fourteen or fifteen. 

I have passed over the Rudolstadt Schutzen- 
fest, its music, its merry-go-round, and the 
capital sausages cooked in the open air, and 
have intentionally omitted many other delightful 



118 IN KEILHAU 

things. I cannot help wondering now where we 
found time for all these summer pleasures. 

True, with the exception of a few days at Whit- 
suntide, we had no vacation from Easter until 
the first of September. But even in August one 
thought, one joyous anticipation, filled every 
heart. 

The annual autumn excursion was coming! 

After we were divided into traveling parties 
and had ascertained which teacher was to 
accompany us — a matter that seemed very 
important — we diligently practiced the most 
beautiful songs; and on many an evening Barop 
or Middendorf told us of the places through 
which we were to pass, their history, and the 
legends which were associated with them. They 
were aided in this by one of the sub-teachers, 
Bagge, a poetically gifted young clergyman, who 
possessed great personal beauty and a heart 
capable of entering into the intellectual life of 
the boys who were intrusted to his care. 

He instructed us in the German language and 
literature. Possibly because he thought that he 
discovered in me a talent for poetic expression, 
he showed me unusual favor, even read his own 
verses aloud to me, and set me special tasks in 
verse-writing, which he criticised with me when 
I had finished. The first long poem I wrote of 
my own impulse was a description of the wonder- 
ful forms assumed by the stalactite formations 



IN KEILHAU 119 

in the Sophie Cave in Switzerland, which we had 
visited. Unfortunately, the book containing it 
is lost, but I remember the following lines, 
referring to the industrious sprites which I 
imagined as the sculptors of the wondrous 
shapes: 

"Priestly robes and a high altar the sprites 

created here, 
And in the rock-hewn cauldron poured the 

holy water clear, 
Within whose depths reflected, by the torches' 

flickering rays, 
Beneath the surface glimmering my own face 

met my gaze ; 
And when I thus beheld it, so small it seemed 

to me. 
That yonder stone-carved giant looked on with 

mocking glee. 
Ay, laugh, if that's your pleasure, Goliath 

huge and old, 
/ soon shall fare forth singing, you still your 

place must hold." 

Another sub-teacher was also a favorite 
traveling companion. His name was SchafTner, 
and he, too, with his thick, black beard, was a 
handsome man. To those pupils who, like my 
brother Ludo, were pursuing the study of the 
sciences, he, the mathematician of the institute, 
must have been an unusually clear and com- 



120 IN KEILHAU 

petent teacher. I was under his charge only a 
short time, and his branch of knowledge was 
unfortunately my weak point. Shortly before 
my departure he married a younger sister of 
Barop's wife, and established an educational 
institution very similar to Keilhau at Gumperda, 
at Schwarza in Thuringia. 

Herr Vodoz, our French teacher, a cheery, 
vigorous Swiss, with a perfect forest of curls on 
his head, was also one of the most popular 
guides; and so was Dr. Budstedt, who gave 
instruction in the classics. He was not a hand- 
some man, but he deserved the name of "anima 
Candida.*' He used to storm at the slightest 
occasion, but he was quickly appeased again. 
As a teacher I think he did his full duty, but I 
no longer remember anything about his methods. 

The traveling party which Barop accom- 
panied were very proud of the honor. Midden- 
dorf's age permitted him to go only with the 
youngest pupils, who made the shortest trips. 

These excursions led the little boys into the 
Thuringian forest, the Hartz Mountains, Sax- 
ony and Bohemia, Nuremberg and Wurzburg, 
and the older ones by way of Baireuth and 
Regensburg to Ulm. The large boys in the first 
traveling party, which was usually headed by 
Barop himself, extended their journey as far as 
Switzerland. 

I visited in after-years nearly all the places to 



IN KEILHAU 121 

which we went at that time, and some, with 
which important events in my Hfe were asso- 
ciated, I shall mention later. It would not be 
easy to reproduce from memory the first impres- 
sions received without mingling with them 
more recent ones. 

Thus, I well remember how Nuremberg 
affected me and how much it pleased me. I 
express this in my description of the journey; 
but in the author of "Gred," who often sought 
this delightful city, and made himself familiar 
with life there in the days of its mediaeval 
prosperity, these childish impressions became 
something wholly new. And yet they are 
inseparable from the conception and contents 
of the Nuremberg novel. 

My mother kept the old books containing the 
accounts of these excursions, which occupied 
from two to three weeks, and they possessed 
a certain interest for me, principally because 
they proved how skillfully our teachers under- 
stood how to carry out Froebel's principles on 
these occasions. Our records of travel also 
explain in detail what this educator meant by 
the words "unity with life"; for our attention 
was directed not only to beautiful views or 
magnificent works of art and architecture, but 
to noteworthy public institutions or great 
manufactories. Our teachers took the utmost 
care that we should understand what we saw. 



122 IN KEILHAU 

The cultivation of the fields, the building of 
the peasants* huts, the national costumes, were 
all brought under our notice, thus making us 
familiar with life outside of the school, and 
opening our eyes to things concerning which the 
pupil of an ordinary model grammar school 
rarely inquires, yet which are of great importance 
to the world to which we belong. 

Our material life was sensibly arranged. 

During the rest at noon a cold lunch was 
served, and an abundant hot meal was not 
enjoyed until evening. 

In the large cities we dined at good hotels at 
the table d'hote, and — as in Dresden, Prague, 
and Coburg — were taken to the theater. 

But we often spent the night in the villages, 
and then chairs were turned upside down, loose 
straw was spread on the backs and over the 
floor, and, wrapped in the shawl which almost 
every boy carried buckled to his knapsack, we 
slept, only half undressed, as comfortably as in 
the softest bed. 

While walking we usually sang songs, among 
them very nonsensical ones, if only we could 
keep step well to their time. Often one of the 
teachers told us a story. Schaffner and Bagge 
could do this best, but we often met other 
pedestrians with whom we entered into con- 
versation. How delightful is the memory of 
these tramps! Progress on foot is slow, but not 



IN KEILHAU 123 

only do we see ten times better than from a 
carriage or the window of a car, but we hear and 
learn something while talking with the me- 
chanics, citizens, and peasants who are going 
the same way, or the landlords, bar-maids, and 
table companions we meet in the taverns, 
whose guests live according to the custom of the 
country instead of the international pattern of 
our great hotels. 

As a young married man, I always anticipated 
as the greatest future happiness taking pedes- 
trian tours with my sons like the Keilhau ones; 
but Fate ordained otherwise. 

On our return to the institute we were received 
with great rejoicing; and how much the different 
parties, now united, had to tell one another! 

Study recommenced on the first of October, 
and during the leisure days before that time the 
village church festival was celebrated under' the 
village linden, with plenty of cakes, and a dance 
of the peasants, in which we older ones took part. 

But we were obliged to devote several hours 
of every day to describing our journey for our 
relatives at home. Each one filled a large book, 
which was to be neatly written. The exercise 
afforded better practice in describing personal 
experiences than a dozen essays which had been 
previously read with the teacher. 



INFANT GARDENS 

Reprinted by permission from Dickens as an Educator, by James L. 
Hughes. 

DICKENS wrote the following article 
for Household Words in 1855. It 
reveals a surprising mastery of the 
vital principles of " the new educa- 
tion." He wrote the article to direct attention 
to the work of the Baroness Von Biilow, who had 
come to England to introduce the kindergarten 
system. Dickens's works show that he had long 
been a close student of Froebel's philosophy. 
The article must always take a front rank as a 
strikingly clear, comprehensive, and sympathetic 
exposition of the principles and processes of the 
kindergarten. Kindergartens were called "in- 
fant gardens" when first introduced into Eng- 
land. 

Seventy or eighty years ago there was a son 
born to the Pastor Froebel, who exercised his 
calling in the village of Oberweissbach, in the 
principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. The 
son, who was called Frederick, proved to be a 
child of unusually quick sensibilities, keenly 
alive to all impressions, hurt by discords of all 



INFANT GARDENS 125 

kinds; by quarreling of men, women, and 
children, by ill-assorted colors, inharmonious 
sounds. He was, to a morbid extent, capable of 
receiving delight from the beauties of Nature, 
and, as a very little boy, would spend much of 
his time in studying and enjoying, for their own 
sake, the lines and angles in the Gothic archi- 
tecture of his father's church. Who does not 
know what must be the central point of all the 
happiness of such a child? The voice of its 
mother is the sweetest of sweet sounds, the face 
of its mother is the fairest of fair sights, the 
loving touch of her lip is the symbol to it of all 
pleasures of the sense and of the soul. Against 
the thousand shocks and terrors that are ready 
to afflict a child too exquisitely sensitive, the 
mother is the sole protectress, and her help is 
all-sufhcient. Frederick Froebel lost his mother 
in the first years of his childhood, and his youth 
was tortured with incessant craving for a 
sympathy that was not to be found. 

The Pastor Froebel was too busy to attend to 
all the little fancies of his son. It was his good 
practice to be the peaceful arbiter of the disputes 
occurring in the village, and, as he took his boy 
with him when he went out, he made the child 
familiar with all the quarrels of the parish. Thus 
were suggested, week after week, comparisons 
between the harmony of Nature and the spite 
and scandal current among men. A dreamy, 



126 INFANT GARDENS 

fervent love of God, a fanciful boy's wish that he 
could make men quiet and affectionate, took 
strong possession of young Frederick, and grew 
with his advancing years. He studied a good 
deal. Following out his love of Nature, he 
sought to become acquainted with the sciences 
by which her ways and aspects are explained; 
his contemplation of the architecture of the 
village church ripened into a thorough taste for 
mathematics, and he enjoyed agricultural life 
practically, as a worker on his father's land. At 
last he went to Pestalozzi's school in Switzerland. 
Then followed troublous times, and patriotic 
war in Germany, where even poets fought 
against the enemy with lyre and sword. The 
quick instincts, and high, generous impulses of 
Frederick Froebel were engaged at once, and 
he went out to battle on behalf of Fatherland in 
the ranks of the boldest, for he was one of 
Lutzow's regiment — a troop of riders that earned 
by its daring an immortal name. Their fame 
has even penetrated to our English concert 
rooms, where many a fair English maiden has 
been made familiar with the dare-devil patriots 
of which it was composed by the refrain of the 
German song in honor of their prowess — "Das 
ist Lutzow's fliegende, wilde Jagd." Having 
performed his duty to his country in the ranks 
of its defenders, Froebel fell back upon his love 
of nature and his study of triangles, squares, and 



INFANT GARDENS 127 

cubes. He had made interest that placed him in 
a position which, in many respects, curiously 
satisfied his tastes — that of Inspector to the 
Mineralogical Museum in Berlin. The post was 
lucrative, its duties were agreeable to him, but 
the object of his life's desire was yet to be 
attained. 

For the unsatisfied cravings of his childhood 
had borne fruit within him. He remembered 
the quick feelings and perceptions, the incessant 
nimbleness of mind proper to his first years, and 
how he had been hemmed in and cramped for 
want of right encouragement and sympathy. 
He remembered, too, the ill-conditioned people 
whose disputes had been made part of his 
experience, the dogged children, cruel fathers, 
sullen husbands, angry wives, quarrelsome 
neighbors; and surely he did not err when he 
connected the two memories together. How 
many men and women go about pale-skinned 
and weak of limb, because their physical health 
during infancy and childhood was not established 
by judicious management! It is just so, thought 
Froebel, with our minds. There would be fewer 
sullen, quarrelsome, dull-witted men or women 
if there were fewer children starved or fed 
improperly in heart and brain. To improve 
society — to make men and women better — it is 
requisite to begin quite at the beginning, and 
to secure for them a wholesome education dur- 



128 INFANT GARDENS 

ing infancy and childhood. Strongly possessed 
with this idea, and feeling that the usual 
methods of education, by restraint and penalty, 
aim at the accomplishment of far too little, and 
by checking natural development even do posi- 
tive mischief, Froebel determined upon the 
devotion of his entire energy, throughout his 
life, to a strong effort for the establishment 
of schools that should do justice and honor to 
the nature of a child. He resigned his appoint- 
ment at Berlin, and threw himself, with only 
the resources of a fixed will, a full mind, and a 
right purpose, on the chances of the future. 

At Keilhau, a village of Thuringia, he took 
a peasant's cottage, in which he proposed to 
establish his first school — a village boys' school. 
It was necessary to enlarge the cottage; and, 
while that was being done, Froebel lived on 
potatoes, bread, and water. So scanty was his 
stock of capital on which his enterprise was 
started, that, in order honestly to pay his work- 
men, he was forced to carry his principle of self- 
denial to the utmost. He bought each week 
two large rye loaves, and marked on them with 
chalk each day's allowance. Perhaps he is the 
only man in the world who ever, in so literal a 
way, chalked out for himself a scheme of diet. 

After laboring for many years among the 
boys at Keilhau, Froebel — married to a wife who 
shared his zeal, and made it her labor to help to 



INFANT GARDENS 129 

the utmost in carrying out the idea of her 
husband's life — felt that there was more to be 
accomplished. His boys came to him with many 
a twist in mind or temper, caught by wriggling 
up through the bewilderments of a neglected 
infancy. The first sproutings of the human 
mind need thoughtful culture; there is no period 
of life, indeed, in which culture is so essential. 
And yet, in nine out of ten cases, it is precisely 
while the little blades of thought and buds of 
love are frail and tender that no heed is taken to 
maintain the soil about them wholesome, and 
the air about them free from blight. There must 
be Infant Gardens, Froebel said; and straight- 
way formed his plans, and set to work for their 
accomplishment. 

He had become familiar in cottages with the 
instincts of mothers, and the faculties with 
which young children are endowed by Nature. 
He never lost his own childhood from memory, 
and, being denied the blessing of an infant of his 
own, regarded all the little ones with equal love. 
The direction of his boys' school — now flourish- 
ing vigorously — he committed to the care of a 
relation, while he set out upon a tour through 
parts of Germany and Switzerland to lecture 
upon infant training and to found Infant 
Gardens where he could. He founded them at 
Hamburg, Leipzig, Dresden, and elsewhere. 
While laboring in this way he was always 



130 INFANT GARDENS 

exercising the same spirit of self-denial that had 
marked the outset of his educational career. 
Whatever he could earn was for the children, to 
promote their cause. He would not spend upon 
himself the money that would help in the 
accomplishment of his desire, that childhood 
should be made as happy as God in his wisdom 
had designed it should be, and that full play 
should be given to its energies and powers. 
Many a night's lodging he took, while on his 
travels, in the open fields, with an umbrella for 
his bedroom and a knapsack for his pillow. 

So beautiful a self-devotion to a noble cause 
won recognition. One of the best friends of his 
old age was the Duchess Ida of Weimar, sister to 
Queen Adelaide of England, and his death took 
place on the 21st of June, three years ago, at a 
country seat of the Duke of Meiningen. He 
died at the age of seventy, peacefully, upon a 
summer day, delighting in the beautiful scenery 
that lay outside his window, and in the flowers 
brought by friends to his bedside. Nature, he 
said, bore witness to the promises of revelation. 
So Froebel passed away, 

"And Nature's pleasant robe of green. 
Humanity's appointed shroud, enwraps 
His monument and his memory." 

Wise and good people have been endeavoring 
of late to obtain in this country a hearing for the 



INFANT GARDENS 131 

views of this good teacher, and a trial for his 
system. Only fourteen years have elapsed since 
the first Infant Garden was established, and 
already Infant Gardens have been introduced 
into most of the larger towns of Germany. Let 
us now welcome them with all our hearts to 
England. 

The whole principle of Froebel's teaching is 
based on a perfect love for children, and a full 
and genial recognition of their nature, a deter- 
mination that their hearts shall not be starved 
for want of sympathy; that since they are by 
Infinite Wisdom so created as to find happiness 
in the active exercise and development of all 
their faculties, we, who have children round 
about us, shall no longer repress their energies, 
tie up their bodies, shut their mouths, and 
declare that they worry us by the incessant 
putting of the questions which the Father of us 
all has placed in their mouths, so that the 
teachable one forever cries to those who under- 
take to be its guide, "What shall I do?" To be 
ready at all times with a wise answer to that 
question, ought to be the ambition of every one 
upon whom a child's nature depends for the 
means of healthy growth. The frolic of childhood 
is not pure exuberance and waste. "There is 
often a high meaning in childish play," said 
Froebel. Let us study it, and act upon hints— 
or more than hints— that Nature gives. They 



132 INFANT GARDENS 

fall into a fatal error who despise all that a child 
does as frivolous. Nothing is trifling that forms 
part of a child's life. 

"That which the mother awakens and fosters, 
When she joyously sings and plays; 
That which her love so tenderly shelters, 
Bears a blessing to future days." 

We quote Froebel again, in these lines, and 
we quote others in which he bids us 

"Break not suddenly the dream 
The blessed dream of infancy; 
In which the soul unites with all 
In earth, or heaven, or sea, or sky." 

But enough has already been said to show 
what he would have done. How would he do it? 

Of course it must be borne in mind, through- 
out the following sketch of Froebel's scheme of 
infant training, that certain qualities of mind 
are necessary to the teacher. Let nobody 
suppose that any scheme of education can attain 
its end, as a mere scheme, apart from the 
qualifications of those persons by whom it is to 
be carried out. Very young children can be 
trained successfully by no person who wants 
hearty liking for them, and who can take part 
only with a proud sense of restraint in their 
chatter and their play. It is in truth no con- 
descension to become in spirit as a child with 



INFANT GARDENS 133 

children, and nobody is fit to teach the young 
who holds a different opinion. Unvarying 
cheerfulness and kindness, the refinement that 
belongs naturally to a pure, well-constituted 
woman's mind are absolutely necessary to the 
management of one of Froebel's Infant Gardens, 
Then, again, let it be understood that Froebel 
never wished his system of training to be con- 
verted into mere routine to the exclusion of all 
that spontaneous action in which more than 
half of every child's education must consist. It 
was his purpose to show the direction in which 
it was most useful to proceed, how best to assist 
the growth of the mind by following the indica- 
tions Nature furnishes. Nothing was farther 
from his design, in doing that, than the imposi- 
tion of a check on any wholesome energies. 
Blindman's buff, romps, puzzles, fairy tales, 
everything in fact that exercises soundly any set 
of the child's faculties, must be admitted as a 
part of Froebel's system. The cardinal point of 
his doctrine is— take care that you do not 
exercise a part only of the child's mind or body; 
but take thorough pains to see that you encour- 
age the development of its whole nature. If 
pains— and great pains— be not taken to see 
that this is done, probably it is not done. The 
Infant Gardens are designed to help in doing it. 
The mind of a young child must not be 
trained at the expense of its body. Every 



134 INFANT GARDENS 

muscle ought, if possible, to be brought daily 
into action; and, in the case of a child suffered 
to obey the laws of Nature by free tumbling and 
romping, that is done in the best manner possible. 
Every mother knows that by carrying an infant 
always on the same arm its growth is liable to be 
perverted. Every father knows the child's 
delight at being vigorously danced up and down, 
and much of this delight arises from the play 
then given to its muscles. As the child grows, 
the most unaccustomed positions into which it 
can be safely twisted are those from which it will 
receive the greatest pleasure. That is because 
play is thus given to the muscles in a form they 
do not often get, and Nature — always watchful 
on the child's behalf — cries, We will have some 
more of that. It does us good. As it is with the 
body, so it is with the mind, and Froebel's 
scheme of infant education is, for both, a system 
of gymnastics. 

He begins with the newborn infant, and 
demands that, if possible, it shall not be taken 
from its mother. He sets his face strongly 
against the custom of committing the child 
during the tenderest and most impressible period 
of its whole life to the care and companionship 
of an ignorant nursemaid, or of servants who 
have not the mother's instinct, or the knowledge 
that can tell them how to behave in its presence. 
Only the mother should, if possible, be the 



INFANT GARDENS 135 

child's chief companion and teacher during at 
least the first three years of its life, and she 
should have thought it worth while to prepare 
herself for the right fulfillment of her duties. 
Instead of tambour work, or Arabic, or any 
other useless thing that may be taught at girls' 
schools, surely it would be a great blessing if 
young ladies were to spend some of their time in 
an Infant Garden, that might be attached to 
every academy. Let them all learn from 
Froebel what are the requirements of a child, 
and be prepared for the wise performance of 
what is after all to be the most momentous 
business of their lives. 

The carrying out of this hint is indeed neces- 
sary to the complete and general adoption of the 
infant-garden system. Froebel desired his 
infants to be taught only by women, and 
required that they should be women as well 
educated and refined as possible, preferring 
amiable unmarried girls. Thus he would have 
our maidens spending some part of their time in 
playing with little ones, learning to understand 
them, teaching them to understand; our wives 
he would have busy at home, making good use 
of their experience, developing carefully and 
thoughtfully the minds of their children, sole 
teachers for the first three years of their life; 
afterward, either helped by throwing them 
among other children in an Infant Garden for 



136 INFANT GARDENS 

two or three hours every day, or, if there be at 
home no lack of little company, having Infant 
Gardens of their own. 

Believing that it is natural to address infants 
in song, Froebel encouraged nursery songs, and 
added to their number. Those contributed by 
him to the common stock were of course con- 
tributed for the sake of some use that he had for 
each; in the same spirit — knowing play to be 
essential to a child — he invented games; and 
those added by him to the common stock are all 
meant to be used for direct teaching. It does 
not in the least follow, and it was not the case, 
that he would have us make all nursery rhymes 
and garden sports abstrusely didactic. He 
meant no more than to put his own teaching 
into songs and games, to show clearly that 
whatever is necessary to be said or done to a 
young child may be said or done merrily or 
playfully; and although he was essentially a 
schoolmaster, he had no faith in the terrors 
commonly associated with his calling. 

Froebel's nursery songs are associated almost 
invariably with bodily activity on the part of the 
child. He is always, as soon as he becomes old 
enough, to do something while the song is going 
on, and the movements assigned to him are 
cunningly contrived so that not even a joint of 
a little finger shall be left unexercised. If he be 
none the better, he is none the worse for this. 



INFANT GARDENS 137 

The child is indeed unlucky that depends only 
on care of this description for the full play of its 
body; but there are some children so unfortu- 
nate, and there are some parents who will be 
usefully reminded by those songs, of the necessity 
of procuring means for the free action of every 
joint and limb. What is done for the body is 
done in the same spirit for the mind, and ideas 
are formed, not by song only. The beginning of 
a most ingenious course of mental training by a 
series of playthings is made almost from the 
very first. 

A box containing six soft balls, differing in 
color, is given to the child. It is Froebel's 
" first gift." Long before it can speak the infant 
can hold one of these Httle balls in its fingers, 
become famihar with its spherical shape and its 
color. It stands still, it springs, it rolls. As 
the child grows, he can roll it and run after it, 
watch it with sharp eyes, and compare the color 
of one ball with the color of another, prick up 
his ears at the songs connected with his various 
games with it, use it as a bond of playfellowship 
with other children, practice with it first efforts 
at self-denial, and so forth. One ball is sus- 
pended by a string, it jumps — it rolls — here — 
there— over — up; turns left— turns right — ding- 
dong— tip-tap— falls— spins; fifty ideas may be 
connected with it. The six balls, three of the 
primary colors, three of the secondary, may be 



138 INFANT GARDENS 

built up in a pyramid ; they may be set rolling, 
and used in combination in a great many 
ways giving sufficient exercise to the young wits 
that have all knowledge and experience before 
them. 

Froebel's "second gift" is a small box con- 
taining a ball, cube, and roller (the last two 
perforated), with a stick and string. With 
these forms of the cube, sphere, and cylinder, 
there is a great deal to be done and learned. 
They can be played with at first according to 
the child's own humor: will run, jump, repre- 
sent carts, or anything. The ancient Egyptians, 
in their young days as a nation, piled three cubes 
on one another and called them the three Graces. 
A child will, in the same way, see fishes in stones, 
and be content to put a cylinder upon a cube, 
and say that is papa on horseback. Of this 
element of ready fancy in all childish sport 
Froebel took full advantage. The ball, cube, 
and cylinder may be spun, swung, rolled, and 
balanced in so many ways as to display prac- 
tically all their properties. The cube, spun upon 
the stick piercing it through opposite edges, will 
look like a circle, and so forth. As the child 
grows older, each of the forms may be examined 
definitely, and he may learn from observation to 
describe it. The ball may be rolled down an 
inclined plane and the acceleration of its speed 
observed. Most of the elementary laws of 



INFANT GARDENS 139 

mechanics may be made practically obvious to 
the child's understanding. 

The "third gift" is the cube divided once in 
every direction. By the time a child gets this to 
play with he is three years old — of age ripe for 
admission to an Infant Garden. The Infant 
Garden is intended for the help of children 
between three years old and seven. Instruction 
in it — always by means of play — is given for 
only two or three hours in the day ; such instruc- 
tion sets each child, if reasonably helped at 
home, in the right train of education for the 
remainder of its time. 

An Infant Garden must be held in a large 
room abounding in clear space for child's play, 
and connected with a garden into which the 
children may adjourn whenever weather will 
permit. The garden is meant chiefly to assure, 
more perfectly, the association of wholesome 
bodily exercise with mental activity. If climate 
but permitted, Froebel would have all young 
children taught entirely in the pure, fresh air, 
while frolicking in sunshine among flowers. By 
his system he aimed at securing for them bodily 
as well as mental health, and he held it to be 
unnatural that they should be cooped up in 
close rooms, and glued to forms, when all their 
limbs twitch with desire for action, and there is 
a warm sunshine out of doors. The garden, too, 
should be their own; every child the master or 



140 INFANT GARDENS 

mistress of a plot in it, sowing seeds and watch- 
ing day by day the growth of plants, instructed 
playfully and simply in the meaning of what is 
observed. When weather forbids use of the 
garden, there is the great, airy room which should 
contain cupboards, with a place for every child's 
toys and implements; so that a habit of the 
strictest neatness may be properly maintained. 
Up to the age of seven there is to be no book 
work and no ink work; but only at school a free 
and brisk, but systematic strengthening of the 
body, of the senses, of the intellect, and of the 
affections, managed in such a way as to leave 
the child prompt for subsequent instruction, 
already comprehending the elements of a good 
deal of knowledge. 

We must endeavor to show in part how that 
is done. The third gift — the cube divided once 
in every direction — enables the child to begin 
the work of construction in accordance with its 
own ideas, and insensibly brings the ideas into 
the control of a sense of harmony and fitness. 
The cube divided into eight parts will manufac- 
ture many things; and, while the child is at 
work, helped by quiet suggestion now and then, 
the teacher talks of what he is about, asks many 
questions, answers more, mixes up little songs 
and stories with the play. Pillars, ruined 
castles, triumphal arches, city gates, bridges, 
crosses, towers, all can be completed tc the 



INFANT GARDENS 141 

perfect satisfaction of a child, with the eight 
little cubes. They are all so many texts on 
which useful and pleasant talk can be established. 
Then they are capable also of harmonious 
arrangement into patterns, and this is a great 
pleasure to the child. He learns the charm of 
symmetry, exercises taste in the preference of 
this or that among the hundred combinations 
of which his eight cubes are susceptible. 

Then follows the "fourth gift," a cube divided 
into eight planes cut lengthways. More things 
can be done with this than with the other. 
Without strain on the mind, in sheer play, 
mingled with songs, nothing is wanted but a 
liberal supply of little cubes, to make clear to 
the children the elements of arithmetic. The 
cubes are the things numbered. Addition is 
done with them; they are subtracted from 
each other; they are multiplied; they are di- 
vided. Besides these four elementary rules they 
cause children to be thoroughly at home in the 
principle of fractions, to multiply and divide 
fractions— as real things; all in good time it will 
become easy enough to let written figures 
represent them— to go through the rule of three, 
square root, and cube root. As a child has 
instilled into him the principles of arithmetic, so 
he acquires insensibly the groundwork of 
geometry, the sister science. 

Froebel's "fifth gift" is an extension of the 



142 INFANT GARDENS 

third, a cube divided into twenty-seven equal 
cubes, and three of these further divided into 
halves, three into quarters. This brings with it 
the teaching of a great deal of geometry, much 
help to the lessons in number, magnificent 
accessions to the power of the little architect, 
who is provided, now, with pointed roofs and 
other glories, and the means of producing an 
almost infinite variety of symmetrical patterns, 
both more complex and more beautiful than 
heretofore. 

The "sixth gift" is a cube so divided as to 
extend still farther the child's power of combin- 
ing and discussing it. When its resources are 
exhausted and combined with those of the 
"seventh gift" (a box containing every form 
supplied in the preceding series), the little 
pupil — seven years old — has had his inventive 
and artistic powers exercised, and his mind 
stored with facts that have been absolutely 
comprehended. He has acquired also a sense of 
pleasure in the occupation of his mind. 

But he has not been trained in this way only. 
We leave out of account the bodily exercise 
connected with the entire round of occupation, 
and speak only of the mental discipline. There 
are some other "gifts" that are brought into 
service as the child becomes able to use them. 
One is a box containing pieces of wood, or paste- 
board, cut into sundry forms. With these the 



INFANT GARDENS 143 

letters of the alphabet can be constructed; and, 
after letters, words, in such a way as to create 
out of the game a series of pleasant spelling 
lessons. The letters are arranged upon a slate 
ruled into little squares, by which the eye is 
guided in preserving regularity. Then follows 
the gift of a bundle of small sticks, which 
represent so many straight lines; and, by laying 
them upon his slate, the child can make letters, 
patterns, pictures; drawing, in fact, with lines 
that have not to be made with pen or pencil, but 
are provided ready made and laid down with the 
fingers. This kind of Stick-work having been 
brought to perfection, there is a capital extension 
of the idea with what is called Pea-work. By 
the help of peas softened in water, sticks may be 
joined together, letters, skeletons of cubes, 
crosses, prisms may be built; houses, towers, 
churches may be constructed, having due 
breadth as well as length and height, strong 
enough to be carried about or kept as specimens 
of ingenuity. Then follows a gift of flat sticks, 
to be used in plaiting. After that there is a 
world of ingenuity to be expended on the plait- 
ing, folding, cutting, and pricking of plain or 
colored paper. Children five years old, trained 
in the Infant Garden, will delight in plaiting 
slips of paper variously colored into patterns 
of their own invention, and will work with a 
sense of symmetry so much refined by training 



144 INFANT GARDENS 

as to produce patterns of exceeding beauty. By 
cutting paper, too, patterns are produced in the 
Infant Garden that would often, though the 
work of very little hands, be received in schools 
of design with acclamation. Then there are 
games by which the first truths of astronomy, 
and other laws of Nature, are made as familiar 
as they are interesting. For our own parts, we 
have been perfectly amazed at the work we have 
seen done by children of six or seven — bright, 
merry creatures, who have all the spirit of their 
childhood active in them, repressed by no 
parent's selfish love of ease and silence, cowed by 
no dull-witted teacher of the ABC and the 
pothooks. 

Froebel discourages the cramping of an infant's 
hand upon a pen, but his slate ruled into little 
squares, or paper prepared in the same way, is 
used by him for easy training in the elements of 
drawing. Modeling in wet clay is one of the 
most important occupations of the children who 
have reached about the sixth year, and is used 
as much as possible, not merely to encourage 
imitation, but to give some play to the creative 
power. Finally, there is the best possible use 
made of the paint-box, and children engaged 
upon the coloring of pictures and the arrange- 
ment of nosegays are further taught to enjoy, 
not merely what is bright, but also what is 
harmonious and beautiful. 



INFANT GARDENS 145 

We have not left ourselves as much space as is 
requisite to show how truly all such labor 
becomes play to the child. Fourteen years' 
evidence suffices for a demonstration of the 
admirable working of a system of this kind; but 
as we think there are some parents who may be 
willing to inquire a Httle further into the subject 
here commended earnestly to their attention, 
we will end by a citation of the source from 
which we have ourselves derived what informa- 
tion we possess. 

At the educational exhibition in St. Martin's 
Hall, last year, there was a large display of the 
material used and results produced in Infant 
Gardens which attracted much attention. The 
Baroness von Marenholtz, enthusiastic in her 
advocacy of the children's cause, came then to 
England, and did very much to procure the 
establishment in this country of some experi- 
mental Infant Gardens. By her, several months 
ago — and at about the same time by M. and 
Madame Rong6, who had already established 
the first English Infant Garden — our attention 
was invited to the subject. We were also made 
acquainted with M. Hoffman, one of Froebel's 
pupils, who explained the system theoretically 
at the Polytechnic Institution. When in this 
country, the Baroness von Marenholtz published 
a book called Woman's Educational Mission, 
being an explanation of Frederick Froebel's 



146 INFANT GARDENS 

System of Infant Gardens. We have made use 
of the book in the preceding notice, but it 
appeared without the necessary illustrations, and 
is therefore a less perfect guide to the subject 
than a work published more recently by M. and 
Madame Ronge: A Practical Guide to the 
English Kindergarten. This last book we exhort 
everybody to consult who is desirous of a closer 
insight into Froebel's system than we have been 
able here to give. It not only explains what the 
system is, but, by help of an unstinted supply of 
little sketches, enables any one at once to study 
it at home and bring it into active operation. It 
suggests conversations, games; gives many of 
Froebel's songs, and even furnishes the music 
(which usually consists of popular tunes — Mary 
Blane, Rousseau's Dream, etc.) to which they 
may be sung. Furthermore, it is well to say that 
any one interested in this subject, whom time 
and space do not forbid, may see an Infant 
Garden in full work by calling, on a Tuesday 
morning between the hours of ten and one, on 
M. and Madame Ronge, at number 32 Tavistock 
Place, Tavistock Square. That day these 
earliest and heartiest of our established infant 
gardeners have set apart, for the help of a good 
cause, to interruptions and investigations from 
the world without, trusting, of course, we 
suppose, that no one will disturb them for the 
satisfaction of mere idle curiosity. 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT 
KEILHAU* 

HENRIETTA SCHRADER, BERLIN 
Reprinted by permission of Amalie Hofer Jerome. 

I 

A WORD about my personal connec- 
tions with Friedrich Froebel and 
his family will not be out of place 
in these reminiscences. My ma- 
ternal grandfather, Superintendent and Con- 
sistorial Assessor Hoffmann of Nette, near 
Hildesheim in the former Kingdom of Hanover, 
was born in Thuringia, where his father was 
pastor. One of the sisters of my grandfather 
married the Pastor Froebel in Oberweissbach in 
1782, the youngest child of this marriage being 
Friedrich Froebel, the mother dying shortly 
after his birth. Christian, the older brother of 
Froebel, born in 1770, also left Thuringia for 
the Province of Hanover, settling in the little 
town of Osterode, in the Hartz, where he 
established a linen industry, and married a wife 
from this place. Osterode and Nette being so 
near together the families had constant inter- 

*Translated by Bertha Hofer Hegner. Edited by Amalie 
Hofer Jerome. 



148 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

course with each other. My grandfather had 
three daughters, Johanna, Luise, and Christiane, 
the second of which was my mother. The 
Froebels in Osterode had besides several sons the 
three daughters Albertine, Emilie, and EHse, 
who were about the age of the daughters of the 
Hoffmann family, with whom they were most 
cordial friends. Among other relatives coming 
to Nette was Friedrich Froebel, who frequently 
visited his uncle. Our mother often told us 
afterwards that these visits of Friedrich were 
among her choicest recollections. In 1817 
Froebel established his boys' school in Keilhau, 
near Rudolstadt, in Thurlngia. In 1818 he 
married Henrietta Wilhelmine Hofifmeister, of 
Berlin. In 1820 Christian Froebel moved to 
Keilhau to take charge of the domestic manage- 
ment of the Institute. The two friends of 
Froebel, Middendorf and Langethal, joined him 
at Keilhau in 1817. In 1826 Langethal married 
the adopted daughter of Froebel, and in the 
same year Albertine Froebel became the wife of 
Middendorf. In 1828 Barop joined the Keilhau 
Institute and married Emilie Froebel. In 1830 
the fianc^ of Elise Froebel, Karl, who was a 
teacher in the Keilhau school, died, and also my 
grandparents in Nette. My mother married the 
Pastor Breymann in Mahlum, Province Braun- 
schweig, which was about an hour and a half 
journey from Nette. During the summer of 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 149 

1826 my parents went in company with our 
Aunt Christiane to Thuringia, visiting the 
several families of our relations, and spending 
• considerable time at Keilhau. From this time 
onward a cordial and constant correspondence 
was kept up between my mother and Albertine 
Middendorf, and in this way our parents took 
the deepest interest in the vicissitudes of the 
Institute, and the difficulties which swept over 
Keilhau so soon after their visit. 

Frequent guests came from Keilhau to our 
home who brought accounts of the work there, 
and kept us informed of the varied changes 
experienced by our beloved friends. Thus the 
year 1848 arrived. In 1839 the wife of Friedrich 
Froebel had passed away, and Barop had become 
the principal of the Keilhau school. Eight 
children had been born to him, and four to the 
Middendorf family, three sons and an only 
daughter, Alwina. Christian Froebel and his 
wife were still active in conducting the eco- 
nomics of the school, although the former had 
grown entirely blind. Langethal had left 
Keilhau to take a parsonage in Schlesien. 
Friedrich Froebel had spent the larger part of 
1836 in Switzerland, and after his return had 
opened a new institution at Blankenburg near 
by, which was devoted to the especial training of 
women and children. Unfortunately he was 
obliged to abandon this work on account of 



150 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

financial difficulty, and he returned to Keilhau in 
1840, where he took residence in a peasant's 
house near the Institute, and during the winter 
conducted the training of several kindergartners 
who lived in Keilhau, boarding at the Institute. 
Froebel made frequent journeys during this 
summer to other cities in the interest of his 
educational idea, having at this time no imme- 
diate part in the management of the Keilhau 
school. Several young girls had been admitted 
to the Institute in company with the daughters 
of the principal, Barop, and it was finally decided 
by my parents to send our eleven-year-old sister 
to join them. Our many relatives there urged 
me to accompany my sister, and in response to 
the hearty invitations, Marie and I started in 
May, 1848, for Thuringia, the land which had 
cradled our Grandfather Hoffmann. 

I take the following notes from my journals 
and letters, written during the summer of 1848 
in Rudolstadt and Keilhau : 

Rudolstadt, May, 1848. — You have been think- 
ing, dearest mother, that Marie and I are 
already in Keilhau, but we are still here; but all 
obstacles are at last removed, and we shall soon 
reach our place of destination. The trunk has 
arrived, and I am recovered from my cold, but 
how are you, dear mother? Are you quite well? 
To-day is Sunday, and you are going to our dear 
little church at this very moment, thinking of 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 151 

your absent children and remembering them in 
your prayers. Dear mother, it is most beautiful 
here, and in these lovely surroundings I miss one 
thing only, and that is your and father's true 
heartedness. If we could enjoy all this goodness 
and beauty together with you, how happy I 
should be. I am sad when I think that I can be 
of no help to you now with the children and in 
the house, and that father has so many added 
expenses on account of our travel. But the 
thought that I shall be a better help to you after 
I have had this lovely visit comforts me. 

Monday. — At last we are arrived in Keilhau, 
where all gave us a friendly reception. The first 
to welcome us was Frau von Born, the sister of 
Barop, who is living here in order that she may 
not be separated from her sons, who are being 
educated in the school. Next came the five 
daughters of the Barop family, all sturdy, strong 
girls, with dark hair and brown eyes, dressed in 
rustic simplicity, which seems to be necessary 
here. Their father is an earnest, stately man, 
wearing his hair very long, with a straight part 
in the middle. He inspired us with the greatest 
respect, but gave us a most cordial welcome. 
When Elise Froebel appeared my heart grew 
warm, for she gave us such a bright, loving look. 
What an active life she leads here, and her 
helper in the home, Malchen, led us at once to 
the dining-room, where we were to take supper 



152 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

with the family. A loud cheering greeted us in 
this room, which was filled with boys and 
bearded men, who were all engaged in a lively 
conversation. We had potato salad and cold 
meat, which tasted unusually good. As soon as 
any one of the boys had finished his supper, he 
was allowed to leave the table, and each inva- 
riably rushed boisterously out into the court, 
where all were soon taking part in happy games. 
Frau Barop is ill, and we have not yet seen her. 
After supper we visited the grandparents, that 
is, Christian Froebel and his wife, who live in the 
"lower house." The grandfather is quite blind, 
although otherwise a hale and hearty man, 
helping everywhere, even folding up the clothes, 
and helping with the laundry. The grandmother 
is a tiny, trim little woman, very quiet but keen 
and thoughtful. We had to tell them many 
things, and the grandfather told us much about 
the dear grandparents at Nette, and what a 
cultured, wise man the grandfather was, and 
how many times he had enjoyed eating carp 
and drinking a glass of wine with him. Then 
Frau Middendorf came. I had imagined her 
very different. She is very bright and happy. 
Everything here seems so bright, and happy, 
and strong. Marie and I have a beautiful little 
attic room. A soft rain fell quietly as we went to 
bed, and the sound on the roof was like music, 
which sound put us to sleep. 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 153 

To-day we have taken some beautiful walks, 
climbing to the top of the Kolm, which slopes 
back from the school and belongs to the grounds. 
The boys and teachers were all busy laying out 
the comfortable footpaths and building hermit- 
ages, and resting places in different parts of the 
grounds. During the Whitsuntide holidays the 
pupils live on the hillside all day long, working, 
planting flowers, repairing the walks and build- 
ings, and cooking on their rudely constructed 
stoves. We saw some boiling potatoes, and 
others making pancakes. We climbed up to the 
tower, from the top of which we could look down 
into the beautiful valley. Did you climb here, 
too, dear parents, when you were here on your 
visit? I am sure you did, for it is the most 
beautiful spot about Keilhau. I look out over 
the broad, rich valley, encircled by blue hills, 
with the pines rustling back of me. When I 
close my eyes it seems as if I were being carried 
by wings on this refreshing air, which is all 
around us. There is something strangely 
indescribable about these surroundings. I think 
it must be the spirit in Keilhau which permeates 
everything. I have the feeling that this same 
spirit must also quicken me, and that it will 
penetrate through the chaos of thoughts and 
feelings which ever struggle and toss about 
within me. I feel that it will lead me to a clear- 
ness of my inner being. 



154 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

Tuesday. — Last night we sat in the moonlight 
under a beautiful birch tree on the Kolm. My 
dear mother, if I only could tell you all I feel and 
wish to do. But there is so much that is unutter- 
able in this unique place. I seem to grow freer 
every moment, and am gaining new insight into 
a life which I cannot yet put into words. I feel 
as if I had been here a long, long time; as if this 
were my real home; and yet at the same time 
every fiber of my heart is attached to my old 
home. Every one is kind and good to us here, 
and we move freely in this new circle. I am all 
over the house, now upstairs, now down, then 
visiting the grandparents. I always find some- 
thing to do and some one to help. They are 
always ready to give me such work to do as I can. 
The Institute is fairly blooming at this time. 
At Easter twenty boarding-school pupils were 
refused because there was no room. I can easily 
understand why parents wish their children to 
live here. You should see how good everything 
tastes. The large crocks of milk and baskets of 
bread that are brought for breakfast disappear 
rapidly. It is the same way at dinner and 
supper, and there is plenty of everything sub- 
stantial. There are no sweets or luxuries, and 
the very things which I did not relish at home 
taste excellent here. The spicy mountain air 
must have something to do with it, and the 
exercise out of doors, and because very little 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 155 

attention is paid to non-essentials. Every one is 
interested in the higher things. Just at present 
political matters are being discussed, but the 
real storms of poUtics do not touch Keilhau, 
which lies so peacefully and quietly surrounded 
by these hills, there is no room for quarreling. 
The rustling of the trees brings peace to my 
heart, the blue skies fill me with hope, and the 
beautiful sun over the shady trees warms my 
soul. The moon and stars shine mildly upon us 
at night, bringing peace. This summer visit to 
Keilhau is surely the brightest spot in all my life. 
Later. — With all my careful listening I have 
not been able to learn what stand is taken here 
with regard to politics, or to what party Keilhau 
belongs. This much I understand, that we 
should have a free and united Germany. But 
what do they call free here? Marie with her 
brightness and freshness is liked by everybody 
and is happy. As soon as she is entirely at 
home I will go to Rudolstadt, and come back 
later for a permanent stay. Middendorf and 
Froebel have not yet returned from their 
travels. How are the children, the stout Erich 
and sweet Hedchen? Were you not pleased 
with the pretty cuttings made by Adolph, which 
you sent me? They are very much admired 
here, and the teachers think he must have a 
great talent for drawing for it was all free hand 
cutting. 



156 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

Diary. Rudolstadt, middle of May. — To-day 
we went to church. The building is large and 
beautifully arched, but the furnishing was gaudy, 
and made one feel restless. These words were 
in gold letters on black marble over the altar, 
and impressed me deeply: "Master, remain 
with us, for the evening is coming." Yes, we 
may well pray the Master to be with us just 
now. We need to hold fast to heaven at this 
time, when the earth is at variance with itself. 
I do not wish to leave it now, but am eager to 
see how these current experiences will unwind 
themselves. I am only grateful that I am not 
one of the causes of all this tangle in which so 
many lose themselves, dragging so many others 
with them through the defeat of the uprising 
party. But are not all these people tools in 
God's hands? If I could only see how all things 
fit together, and how it will all end ! The pastor 
also spoke of the present upheavals, taking his 
text from David's psalm, "The Lord will 
destroy the godless." There was little food for 
the soul in this sermon, and I went home unsat- 
isfied and empty. I am always searching for 
something in church that I cannot find. I look 
for a clearer understanding of the Bible and its 
application to life, but so much remains dark to 
me. I can do nothing with many of the texts, 
and the pressing exhortation of the minister 
that we should turn from the godless has no 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 157 

effect upon me. Who is godless, and who has 
a right to call another godless? It may be hard 
to explain the Bible and inspire men to do the 
good, but I always think, who serves God with 
fervent love and holy zeal is not only a minister 
in the pulpit, but a pastor of souls in the world. 
If I were a minister sitting before the Book of 
Books on a Saturday evening here in the silence, 
with eyes lifted to heaven asking for light, 
would it be denied me? No, never. Whitsuntide 
comes once each year as the festival of the Holy 
Ghost, but every one can celebrate his own 
Whitsuntide if he entreats the Holy Ghost to 
illuminate him. A believer celebrates the 
festivals of the Church many, many times in his 
own heart. If I were only a man and had been 
educated like a man, and could talk about these 
things which stir the heart, like a man! But it 
must be better for me to be a woman. The 
limitations that are put about our sex soften the 
emotions, keep my heart warm, and curb my 
pride. Is it less worthy to hold still, to work 
quietly, to be patient, than it is to struggle, and 
quarrel, and advocate? To be a woman of quiet 
dignity, is not this something high? Was not 
Jesus born of a woman? Was it not the women 
who were true to him until his death, and who 
first proclaimed his resurrection with the cry, 
"The Lord is arisen"? This is my comfort. 



158 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

that women are not excluded from all that is 
highest and best in the world. 

II 

From my letters, 1848. — The peasants around 
Keilhau are celebrating their May festival, 
much as they do with us at home. However, 
they keep their holiday in a much simpler way 
here. They dance down the green in front of the 
Institute, the musician sitting near by; occa- 
sionally one of them steps into the midst of the 
circle with his bass viol, which is the signal for 
all of us to join in the dance. Yesterday being 
Sunday, all were happy and gay, and to-day the 
jollity of the peasants continues. The children 
are all anxious to drop their studies in order to 
participate, but the mild, gentle Middendorf 
stood his ground and said: "Only when the 
work is all done is it good to dance." The kind 
expression on his face sent the children all back 
again to their work in a happy mood. This 
Middendorf is so refreshing. He reminds me 
much of Pastor W., although Middendorf 's 
presence and appearance are far more ideal. 
I love Elise Froebel more and more every day. 
I think she loves me also. She impresses me as 
one of those strong ones upon whom others can 
lean. It seems as if I always had been here. 
Usually I am most fond of such great and 
aristocratic people as one finds at the von C's; 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 159 

you were so often angry with me because nothing 
seemed good enough or great enough for me. 
Here at Keilhau there is nothing of the aristo- 
cratic, in fact, everything aesthetic is lacking, 
and as I look upon the arrangements and manner 
of life here, much seems countrified and crude 
according to our ideas. I cannot understand 
why it never seems unpleasant or jarring. If 
I had children whom I wished to send away 
from home, I should bring them to this place. 
You can hardly imagine how attached the old 
students who have left Keilhau are to the 
Institute. They speak of their stay here as the 
happiest time of their lives. Every day brings 
many guests, among them many of the old 
pupils who come back to stay for a longer or 
shorter time. How happy I shall be to have 
brother Karl make me a visit here! This life 
will be very new to him. Last week we all went 
together to Justinshoehe to see the fireworks in 
honor of the opening of Parliament. If only the 
men had not strewn ashes on their heads at the 
close of the ceremony! People at Rudolstadt 
vie with each other to see which shall have more 
worldly goods than the other. This seems to be 
their one aim in life. What would become of 
the world if each one had everything he wished? 
I am sure that egotism is the cause of all their 
trouble. If they would only cease their "freedom 
cry," and work to do away with egotism, which 



160 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

is at the root of all rivalry, then the tree of 
freedom would have a chance to grow green and 
flourish! I have ceased being interested in 
parties, although I still like to hear the men talk 
about them. It amuses me when they begin to 
quarrel in their arguments, jumping to the 
tables and shouting to be understood. One of 
the teachers by the name of Schweizer is a 
Republican; he, together with Herr L., speaks 
zealously against the king and the kingdom. 
Uncle Froebel has not yet returned, and I am 
growing very anxious to see him. I do not 
exactly understand his relationship to every one 
here in the Institute, and yet it seems to be all 
his work. With the exception of Middendorf , no 
one speaks cordially of him. In Rudolstadt he 
is not given recognition in the same way as are 
Barop, Middendorf, uncle, and aunt. These call 
Froebel unpractical and an idealist, and consider 
it good fortune that he has retired from the 
Institute, which they think was only saved by 
Middendorf and Barop. The other uncle at 
Koenigsee is also unfriendly toward Froebel. 
They say that he constantly borrowed money 
for his work, and when the uncle would no 
longer help him in this way, Froebel grew angry 
with him, although he still owed him for what he 
had already used. My dear parents, you do not 
know how all this grieves me, although I try to 
think that things are different from what they 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 161 

seem. I am sure that when a man desires with 
his whole heart to work for humanity as uncle 
does, that he must first work with himself, and 
above everything else stand as a righteous, good 
citizen. Good-by, my dear ones. 

The first day of Whitsuntide in Keilhau {from 
my diary). — We went to church this morning, 
but I was not uplifted. In the afternoon Mid- 
dendorf read aloud to us from the life and work 
of two men of whom I cannot think highly. 
I wonder that Middendorf can honor and 
befriend such men! I have the privilege of 
attending his class in religious instruction, and 
have there learned to know what is his most 
profound religious sentiment. I am sure that 
he is a Christian ; he meets my whole ideal of a 
true Christian, and yet can he be mistaken in his 
belief? Later in the day Middendorf, together 
with several of the teachers, some of the students, 
and the ladies, took a long walk into some 
beautiful neighboring grounds. Here we sat 
down while Middendorf read us a flower fairy 
story, and it seemed to me that we were in an 
enchanted garden. In the evening the music 
teacher, together with his pupils, gave us a home 
concert. I have been very happy to-day, 
neither my head nor my heart has tormented 
me. I have felt myself free, sailing on through 
Hfe. 

Tuesday. — Yesterday was a very happy day. 



162 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

In the evening there was a hunt ball. After 
dinner the sharpshooters formed in line, and the 
older pupils with their teachers all went to the 
trial grounds. The little ones were taken by 
Middendorf up the hill. At four o'clock Elise 
Froebel and I carried baskets of cakes to them, 
and after the lunch time we made four wreaths 
to crown the kings and queens of the festival. 
While we were busy with the wreaths a drum- 
beat announced the successful sharpshooter 
among the older pupils who had struck the 
heart of the target, which was a red and gold 
eagle. He invited Luise Levin to share the 
honor of the day with him by being the queen of 
the festival. Luise had previously cared for the 
house, but is now one of the devoted teachers in 
the Institute, and hopes soon to take a position 
as a kindergartner. She is always caring for me. 
Elise Froebel crowned the king and queen with 
the wreaths we had made, and the sharpshooters 
and teachers presented the gun with great 
ceremony to their successful companion, the 
entire company joining in the cheers, and we all 
marched toward the house singing gayly. When 
we reached home, one of the leaders among the 
Republicans attempted to raise a cry against 
the government, but he was unsuccessful. The 
gifts were presented to the different students, 
when one of the teachers announced: "The 
king and queen must now make all the people 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 163 

happy." The two wearing the wreaths, whether 
they wished to or not, were obHged to dance 
through the great hall in the presence of the 
laughing, gay company, to music which was 
without time or rhyme. The little children 
came into the hall, and sister Marie was their 
queen. We took our supper on the lawn soon 
after, but the older pupils were full of excite- 
ment, and soon hurried away to make their 
toilet for the ball. One by one reappeared, in 
festive attire, the students, with white trousers 
and gloves, leaving a trail of eau de Cologne 
behind them. The ball opened brilliantly, and 
not until the gray morning dawned did we finish 
the last cotillon. 

Sunday, June 17 , Keilhau. — Dearest parents, 
at last uncle is here! Immediately after the 
festival I returned to Rudolstadt, and on Friday 
evening the following note was handed to me: 
" Uncle has returned to Keilhau, and longs to see 
Fraulein Henrietta Breymann; perhaps to-mor- 
row. Please pardon the liberty." Signed R. 
How this good news stirred and excited me! 
I decided to go back to Keilhau the next morn- 
ing. On second thought the words "perhaps 
to-morrow" seemed to Infer that there was no 
great hurry. Nevertheless I started, accom- 
panied by Marie and her brother, as early as 
five o'clock in the morning. The way to Keilhau 
never seemed so long or laborious. I was met on 



164 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

my early arrival by the astonishment of all, and 
R. smiled when he saw me. He said uncle had 
merely asked him, in case he should see me on 
Friday at Rudolstadt, to let me know that he 
had returned. He was, therefore, amused at my 
eagerness. But uncle came at last, and fairly 
folded his arms about me, his ever thoughtful 
look smiling upon me. "I have longed to see 
you, my dear child, and thank you for coming." 
Soon after breakfast he took me by the hand 
and led me out of doors. " I know you well, my 
child, from your letters and talks with Luise. 
Have confidence also in me. I think I find in you 
a searching soul, and perhaps I can help you find 
that for which you search, of which you are 
perhaps yourself unconscious. Tell me frankly 
what you wish your life to be?" I can hardly 
describe the feeling which swept over me as 
uncle thus spoke to me. I at once told him 
everything, everything that I had felt in body 
and mind, how I had longed with my whole 
heart to do good, but had done so little as yet. 
Yes, dear parents, I confessed to him how I did 
not enjoy doing daily duties at home, and how 
it was hard for me to do over and over again 
household work, and how at the same time 
I longed to make your home burden Hghter, and 
help share the care of the children. I told him 
how often I felt useless and weak enough to die, 
and how it seemed that death would be my only 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 165 

salvation. He was so still, letting me pour out 
all I had to say, and when I was quiet again, he 
put his arms about me: "My dear child, it is 
not given me to be a father in the literal sense, 
but for this very reason I can devote my life to 
others, and so to you I can also be a father. It 
is not without a purpose that God has given you 
a mind of greater strength than your body; do 
not rebel against nature. Your mind is seeking 
clearness, is looking for work. Many people 
grow sick in body because the mind cannot free 
itself. Make yourself free and you will see that 
the soul is greater than the body, and must 
triumph. Never seek to flee from the body, for 
before you can be an angel in heaven you must 
be one on earth. I want to help you be one here, 
and I am sure you will find the happiness and 
peace for which you are seeking." He continued 
to speak so confidentially and appealingly and 
so beautifully. Could I but give to you every 
word as it reechoes! He opened a new world 
for me, and led me to look into the inner life, 
and I seem to understand that no one lives here 
on earth in vain, and the meaning came clear to 
me how God is mighty in the weak. Yes, I am 
sure that humanity is a unit, and to each is 
given a place in the whole if he but recognize it. 
Now I have come to a turning-point in my life, 
and I see its high purposes, and my path is 
suddenly clear before me, — I am to give myself 



166 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

to childhood and its nurture. Dear parents, I 
can now help you better, too. I can keep dear 
sister Hedchen from experiencing the lonesome- 
ness which tormented me when a little child, and 
through me you can teach Adolph, Wilhelm, and 
Erich, and so I can help you all. If it is yours or 
God's will, I can find work away from home, 
too, for my plan now is to devote myself to the 
teachings of uncle, and to study French and 
English at the same time. What joy it brings 
to me to feel that I have a definite life work! 
I have told Luise all about my plan, and she 
agrees with me that it is right, and will soon talk 
it over with uncle. 

Keilhau, June, 1848 {copy from my journal). — 
I have finished a long letter to my parents, and 
have told them my life-work plans. Will these, 
indeed, come to fulfillment? God grant it. At 
last, at last I am to find a rest within myself; 
I am to have a definite aim in life, one which 
will give me the right to think, one which will 
enlarge my heart, and the pursuit of which will 
not necessarily separate me from the loved ones 
at home, but rather make me capable of being 
a better daughter and a better sister. I have 
given my confidence to Luise, and I feel that we 
are coming nearer and closer together each day. 
We speak to each other as "thou." She wishes 
to do everything possible to further my plans, 
and I will ask Middendorf to give me permission 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 167 

to follow some science lessons at the Institute. 
She tells me that I have made a deep impression 
upon uncle. He said to her: "Henrietta is one 
of us, that I have already discovered. Have 
you noticed how her character shows itself in 
her appearance and dress?" When uncle first 
saw me I wore a blue and white striped dress, 
blue being his favorite color. The waist was 
finished at the neck and belt with blue satin 
ribbons; each bow was fastened with a silver 
pin, the head of which was a cube. It seemed 
that these pins especially pleased Froebel. 
Luise tells me that the cube is a symbol of the 
fundamental idea of Froebel's educational 
scheme. She says that Froebel illustrates the 
law of mediation in the second play gift for the 
children by means of the sphere, cube, and 
cylinder. Luise has told me many interesting 
things about his work, much of which is not 
yet clear to me, and it even seems mysterious. 
I have never heard or read of such ideas as they 
have here, but I shall certainly understand it all 
if I am only permitted to stay with uncle. If 
only his course of lessons can be given here next 
winter, and if I only can stay at Keilhau! 

Froebel lives in a country house across the 
way from the Institute. His living room is very 
comfortable, and Luise has told me that his first 
wife was a most cultured woman, one who 
craved beautiful and attractive surroundings. 



168 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

Many of the lovely things in his sitting-room 
came from her, and he prizes them highly. 
Fresh flowers are a necessity to him, and Luise 
keeps them always in his room. So long as the 
lilies last his table is never without them. He 
calls the lily and the calla his "life-flowers," 
and he always has calla growing in pots wherever 
he settles down to live. He has explained 
many things to Luise about the calla, with 
reference to the laws of life. If I could only 
understand these deep things! Hitherto I have 
loved nature above all else, but I have never 
studied her, for no one has ever before called my 
attention to the necessity for such study. 
Froebel thinks, too, that I should spend much 
time with the plants, and he has said to me: 
"Plants, in their fettered silence, reveal far 
more of the law which governs life than do 
animals or man with all their freedom of motion, 
their passions, and free will. Through the 
latter men too often fall into mistaken ways, 
and bring discord into life." Also from the 
stones and the crystals uncle reads much by 
which to interpret the human soul. In the 
formation of these he finds a correspondence to 
the law of human evolution. Luise showed me 
a box containing various forms of wood, which 
is called the chest of "solids," which uncle 
explains in his study course. Shall I ever fathom 
it all? 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 169 

At one time uncle conducted an institute for 

kindergartners in the next village, Blankenburg, 

but it was given up on account of insufficient 

money. It is said that he demanded great 

moneys for this institution of both Barop and 

Middendorf, and was often unpractical and 

dictatorial. Luise is very sad that uncle is not 

better understood. She clings to him with 

daughterly affection. She cares for him, and 

believes in the greatness of his idea. The other 

women of Keilhau do not seem to feel the same. 

One sees a bitterness among them whenever the 

conversation turns on the subject of uncle. 

I see very little of the v/omen as I stay on. They 

are entirely occupied with their households and 

families. They do their own cooking, and take 

turns in doing the household work. My noble 

Elise has so much to do, now in the cellar, now 

in the kitchen, at the wash-house, or in the 

garden. What a pity that she cannot spend 

more time with the boys and the teachers, for 

she has a sureness and tact in association with 

them which is very helpful, and all rejoice when 

she comes among them for a free hour with her 

hand work. One feels in her presence a goodness 

which has a lovely influence upon all. 

The Institute buildings are divided into what 
is called the "upper and the lower house," 
between which a new addition is being built, 
which is intended later to receive the youngest 



170 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

boys. In the upper house is the family room, in 
which there is an old but comfortable sofa, in 
fact, the only one which I have ever seen in the 
Institute; otherwise the entire room is extremely 
plain, without adornment, or even a shimmer of 
beauty, — but I love this room. One or another 
who has a free hour, or wishes to chat or read 
a little if he finds company, comes here. Re- 
cently, when it was too cold and damp in the 
garden, we all sat there, and in assigned parts 
read "Don Carlos," but I must write you all 
about this at another time. On the floor above 
the Barops have their home, but I have not yet 
visited them. Frau Barop is a delicate, gentle 
lady, much loved by the boys. In the lower 
house live the grandparents, Middendorf, sister 
Marie, and the five Barop daughters, who meet 
together with the students only in class hours 
and on special occasions. I am all day long in 
the dining-room, or in the family room of the 
upper house, or in the garden. I take a fine 
walk nearly every day, usually after the after- 
noon 'coffee, otherwise after supper between 
seven and eight o'clock, when I always look for 
one of the women to accompany me, Elise, 
Luise, and Frau von Born, or Malchen, and when 
they say they have no time to go with me, I help 
them with the work so that they may be free 
and have an hour to wander in the beautiful 
outdoor world. Occasionally some of the 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 171 

gentlemen join us. Yesterday evening uncle 
took me up the Kolm, several others following 
us. It was a genuine summer evening ; the trees 
rustled softly, and fireworms flitted in the warm 
evening light. Some one had presented me with 
a beautiful bouquet of roses, and I put several 
glowworms in among the petals. The effect 
was fairy-like. Uncle took one of the dark red 
roses and put it in my hair, and was much 
pleased over the magic illumination on my head 
made by the glowworms in the rose. 

Ill 

Keilhau in June {from my Journal). — Uncle 
is unremitting in his work. He writes letters 
day and night, besides traveling about a great 
deal. Together with several men from else- 
where, whom he has won over to the cause, he 
has called a meeting of educators, to be held at 
Rudolstadt, in August. Ladies are to be invited 
also. Uncle's ideas about the education of 
women and children are being discussed in many 
journals, but Luise tells me that they are as yet 
little understood and often attacked. At this 
gathering of educators, the kindergarten is to be 
openly discussed, and although Luise is a little 
anxious about the great day, she firmly believes 
that the good cause will come out victorious. 
When she has a minute's time she helps uncle 
with his correspondence. She seldom has any 



172 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

time to herself, as the household duties are many, 
and Luise must help in these. 

Why cannot the women arrange their house- 
work so that there is some time left for other 
things? Why do they not give more time to the 
teaching of the boys? The young men, the 
teachers, and the visiting students, who came 
back for a few weeks, are always greatly pleased 
to have the women join them. I like to talk 
with this one and the other one, and we seem to 
be benefited by this exchange of ideas. How 
delightful such society is ! In former days uncle's 
wife is said to have added much to the intellec- 
tual life of this circle of men, as well as to have 
mothered the young boys. Middendorf thinks 
very highly of her, but the women say she was 
not plain enough, and that her housekeeping 
was not practical. Is it then not possible to be 
both spiritually minded and practical at the 
same time? It must be possible. 

Saturday evening I went with Luise to visit 
uncle, and helped her copy letters. I must 
confess that I would have enjoyed taking a walk 
quite as well. Uncle begrudges himself all rest. 
Toward evening he goes with a great company 
of Keilhau children to Eichfeld and Schaale, to 
play the games which are to be given by the 
children at the educational meeting. Some of 
his former pupils of the training class will help 
him in the games. It would be impossible for 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 173 

me to play in such games before people, — am 
I very self-conscious? 

Uncle values the play of children highly. He 
has said to me: "The plays of a child are his 
first deeds. We must put such material in his 
way that he may unconsciously develop into all 
that is thoughtful and useful; we must ever 
direct the play toward that which is uplifting, 
so that even the play of his life may be noble. 
When we play with children we must never try 
to bring them up to our ideas, but must look 
down into their hearts, and become childlike, 
and must thoughtfully and gently study their 
tendencies and motives; inasmuch as we do this 
will we reach the child's inner nature and help 
him unfold beautifully. We must cherish the 
child's nature, from his birth on through his 
whole life ; yes, nurture it, — for this is your work. 
An educator must always look, like a gardener, 
to the future. He must know that the seed he 
sows, and the garden he lays out, will in time 
appear altogether different from the day he 
plants; not that they are become a new or 
entirely different thing — they have only devel- 
oped what was within them. Such is the 
relationship between child and adult; the child 
is man in the germ. This should be a holything 
to us w^hile still in its dependency. This germ- 
power must be understood, and when you 
understand it, you have found the Ariadne 



174 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

thread which will guide you through the laby- 
rinth of life. Verily, young women and mothers, 
you have great things in your power. A new 
sense is stirring everywhere, and you are called 
in the new times to accomplish the great and 
the untried." 

Why is it that nearly all of the gentlemen 
here make light remarks ridiculing the games 
which uncle plays with the children, and often 
slighting remarks about the kindergarten? I 
must confess that I cannot always be angry 
with them for these remarks, and am often 
tempted to laugh with them. But as often as 
I hear uncle speak about the meaning of these 
things, I see all in another light and feel heartily 
ashamed of myself. Uncle fairly stirs my soul 
with his thoughts. If only I could see the 
connection between his principles and these 
gam^es, which are very strange to me! New 
light will come, I am sure, when we begin our 
course of lessons in October, and then I can 
better defend the cause of "Herrn Froebel" 
when the gentlemen make their attacks. I 
shall study diligently with uncle when the class 
begins, meanwhile I must enjoy the blissful 
freedom which I feel here. I must take deep, 
deep draughts of this air which surrounds us, 
in which the natural and spiritual seem to melt 
into one. 

A letter. — This is what my heart has said over 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 175 

-and over again these last few days: "If only 
dear father were here!" or, " If I were only with 
you now, dearest mother, and v/ith all of you in 
our dear home! " All is darkened and troubled 
within me. If only a single ray of light might 
break through this inner chaos! It is true that 
I have grown richer and older in experience 
during the past weeks; I have pressed forward 
through many dark places; and when I think of 
all that I have thought out and worked through 
in my short Hfe, I tremble at the thought of all 
that still awaits me before I may behold the 
pure light of truth. I long for rest; I yearn to 
lose myself in the eternity of truth. At the same 
time I ask, Does the soul ever rest? The answer 
comes, No, no, I cannot conceive of spirit 
without activity. Thus thinking on an eternity 
of working and striving, I grow weary, and long 
for an endless sleep, such as death,— a sleep 
without dreams, without pictures; deep down in 
the cool, still earth, with the light of the sun, 
the dew of the flowers, and the rustling of the 
trees over me. 

It is grown quite clear to me that I am not 
intended to stand and work in the great world. 
I am unable to guide the helm out on the agitated 
world-ocean. Only where I understand all, can 
prove all, and grasp the meaning of all, only 
there can I be happy and make others happy. 
And yet, the quiet stream by which I loiter, 



176 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

does it not run on to the great ocean? do not its 
water drops mingle with those of the ocean's 
huge waves, which rise and fall in ceaseless 
changings? 

September 3. — The above I wrote some time 
ago, while the impressions of the Rudolstadt 
teachers' convention were still confusing and 
confounding me. Fourteen days are now passed, 
and this quiet Sunday morning, while all is 
restful within me, I will try to give you a sketch 
of our recent experience, which is now being so 
widely discussed. Have patience with me if 
I do not tell what happened in the right order, 
for it was the first time in my life that I ever 
attended anything like a teachers' convention, 
and so I was deeply impressed by all I saw and 
heard. Activity and progress surround us. The 
old schoolmasters are waking from their long 
sleep, and it is evident that a renewed and 
unified spirit of the people can only be attained 
by national education. And the Froebel kinder- 
garten was acknowledged at the teachers' 
convention as the foundation of such an educa- 
tion. The kindergarten was shown to be the 
connection between the family and the school, 
and by means of these methods the children are 
brought into vital connection with the life- 
whole, which like a tree grows up out of the 
germ of sacred family life. 

Froebel spared no pains to bring about the 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 177 

convention. No journey was too far, no weather 
so bad that it could keep him from carrying 
out his plans. He secured accommodations for 
two to three hundred people in Rudolstadt, 
and every one gladly received them. Here in 
Keilhau also were guests, and among them some 
of the kindergartners previously trained by 
Froebel. There was excitement and bustle on 
all sides. Over those of us only who stand 
faithfully for Froebel hung a cloud of depression. 
We feared for his peculiarities of speech ; for so 
many new thoughts surge up while he is speak- 
ing, and his sentences often grow lengthy and 
tangled, and his meaning grows involved and 
indefinite, and who would presume to make his 
meaning clear to others when he himself failed. 

Luise and Amalie Krueger, and other kinder- 
gartners, dreaded playing the games with the 
children of Keilhau and Eichfeld, for neither of 
these places have a kindergarten. The children 
were especially trained for this occasion, that 
the people might have a practical example of the 
Froebel children's games. 

At last the great day came, finding some of us 
full of fear and trembling. All eagerly took their 
way to Rudolstadt. Thursday was spent in 
general preparations. Dr. Sommer of Salzungen, 
and Dr. Kell of Leipzig, were made president 
and vice president. Eight directors were 
selected, and Middendorf was made one of 



178 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

them. The evenings were spent in music. 
Early the second morning all the kindergartners 
gathered at the house of Frau Baehring, where 
I found them, and together we went to the hotel 
"Ritter," where the first session was being held. 
Many people were already assembled when the 
kindergarten children from Saalfeld came in 
their wagon, which was covered with wreaths 
and flowers. The lower part of the hall was 
filled with teachers, while the galleries were 
crowded with visitors, prompted either by 
curiosity or interest. The citizens of Rudolstadt 
stood guard at the open doors of the hall. 
Under the royal box a platform was placed, 
decorated with flowers and green wreaths. Here 
the presidents and directors took their seats. 
Over this platform v/as hung a picture of Jesus 
blessing the little children, while on either side 
were appropriate mottoes. Unfortunately I can 
remember but one of these, which read as 
follows: "Come let us give our lives to the 
children." 

IV 

{Continued from letter describing the Rudolstadt 
Convention). — When the entire company were 
gathered together and in order, all arose and 
sang with deep feeling, to the melody of 
"Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott," appropriate 
words, which had been composed by Midden- 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 179 

dorf, each stanza of which closed with an 
exhortation to Hve with the children. After 
appropriate greetings, the president explained 
in a few clear, concise sentences, that there 
was need for a new foundation for education, 
and expressed the hope that those attending 
the convention might seek to learn and test 
the true spirit of the kindergarten in order to 
see whether this might not be the new founda- 
tion required. 

Then Froebel arose, but before he began to 
speak, he put both hands to his head and 
trembled visibly for a moment. Then he raised 
his head, and from the eyes of the seventy-year- 
old man streamed a soulful light. Now he stood 
calm and firm before us. 

He led a little girl, with her mother, to a table 
upon which were placed the various occupation 
materials. He left the child to build with the 
blocks. The lovely little girl gave one frank 
look into the faces of the assembled company, 
and then hid her head in her mother's lap. 
Froebel spoke to the child, and soon had her full 
confidence. He then turned to the company,' 
taking for his theme — "I lead you now into the 
holy of holies — the family." 

I cannot begin to give you his words in detail. 
I was so much affected by his speech that I did 
not always follow his meaning closely. But 
I remember that he said, among other things: 



180 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

"The new education must be founded upon 
a different law of development, for our children 
and youth everywhere are in need of suitable 
material by which they may work out their 
activities. The child is developed, not alone 
through knowing, but also through working, 
and his self-activity is above all others the 
incentive for his development." 

Now the children came marching and singing 
into the hall, led by the following kindergartners : 
Luise Levin, Christiana Erdmann, Amalie 
Krueger, Auguste Steiner, Ida Weiler, Augusta 
Harold, and several others. This Froebeltook as 
an illustration by which to lead usfromtheconsid- 
eration of family life to that of tha community. 

It is true that Froebel went into much detail 
about plays and games, and his explanations of 
them did not seem altogether clear to me. But 
tha hearts of tha people were opened, and made 
receptive. The touching unconsciousness of the 
children, their clear and irresistible voices, had 
onca mora aroused in tha entire company the 
great love of childhood, and such love, I am 
sure, not only believes and hopes, but has also 
great tolerance. A deep satisfaction seemed to 
rest upon the company. 

I wrote down at the time some of Froebel's 
statements about play, and I will here copy 
them from my notebook: "The gesture-plays 
ara very important as symbols of ideas, which 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 181 

the children are not yet old enough to under- 
stand." As an illustration he mentioned the 
circle-play in which one child stands in the 
middle of the ring, and how in spite of the great 
variety of children, unity is secured by the fact 
that all respond to one central point. At one 
time the children formed three circles, one 
within the other, to illustrate the bark, wood, 
and marrow of the tree, which he said might 
equally well be made to stand for happiness, 
unity, and love. Through such thoughtful 
representations, Froebel hopes to instill in men 
the idea of harmony; through these he believes 
might be aroused the three fundamental activ- 
ities of the soul, — will, intellect, and feeling, — 
and by means of physical activity, and word 
and rhyme, he beUeves that these may be 
translated into action. I have noticed for many 
years how seldom bodily and spiritual activities 
are in harmony. Man seems to lean either 
entirely to the one or to the other. How highly 
important it is for the genuine woman that she 
should blend her household work with her 
spiritual endeavors, and yet how seldom are 
these two activities harmonized. When they 
are found, such women stand out Hke single 
stars in a dark night. May I be a worthy 
reflection of one such woman — my own, noble, 
beloved mother. Froebel's plays seem to me to 
be so arranged that they will supply various 



182 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

great needs. The child is not led into abstract 
v/orlds, but is encouraged to embody his ideas in 
appropriate physical action. Body and soul are 
thus mingled in unity. 

So closed the first morning of the convention. 
The afternoon was set apart for the plays which 
were arranged for the older children. They 
assembled in the open air at the appointed place. 
Froebel stepped into the midst and seemed to be 
possessed with such a zealous play spirit that he 
omitted all words of introduction or explanation 
concerning what was to come. The visitors felt 
a little disappointed on this account, and the 
wish was expressed that Middendorf, whose 
sympathetic nature had won all hearts, should 
step into the children's circle, and make explana- 
tions, but because of deep considerateness, he 
did not consent. Knowing Froebel's zeal so 
well, he knew that such interference would not 
be accepted. 

Yes, if Froebel had but the character of a 
Middendorf! The latter seems to me truly like 
the Christ, always full of love and consideration 
for others. Froebel also lives for others. He 
sacrifices everything for his idea, the accom- 
plishing of which he expects will bring blessedness 
to all mankind ; in so doing he fails to consider 
the individual, and is often harsh and tyrannical 
even to the beloved, noble Middendorf, who is 
his truest friend. 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 183 

So the afternoon games were stretched out, 
and we all feared that Froebel's work would 
suffer a fall, just as in the morning we had hoped 
for the highest success. Ridiculing remarks 
were made about the games by onlookers. 
Froebel was excited and disturbed beyond all 
description, and became unconscious of everyone 
and everything about him. Beautiful as such 
unconsciousness is in one sense, on this day it 
worked serious mischief, and I must confess that 
I could not understand how these endless plays 
especially illustrated Froebel's idea. Yes, I 
must confess that some of them seemed even 
ridiculous. The idea that playing according to 
directions should make men noble, seemed to me 
so narrow and limited and unnatural. At last 
came the closing song. The poor kindergartners, 
especially my good Luise, were thoroughly 
exhausted, and one gentleman who had joined 
our party proposed that we should go to the inn 
for refreshments. We ordered tea, and antici- 
pated a quiet hour after the great excitement of 
the day. But soon a number of strangers, both 
gentlemen and ladies, joined us, and in a short 
time we were all in earnest discussion concerning 
Froebel and his ideas. We soon realized that 
sincere voices were being raised against him, 
and we feared for him. I was especially uncom- 
fortable over my own feeling of disagreement in 
the matter. During the afternoon games I 



184 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

found myself next to a Dresden woman, whom 
I had noticed with the greatest interest at the 
morning session. It was Fraulein Johanna 
Kuestner, who had accompanied Thekla von 
Gumpert, a special friend of uncle. Her exquisite 
figure, her pale, plain, but noble face, which 
expressed great intelligence and sympathy, 
attracted me to her, and I was filled with the 
desire to know her better. The afternoon 
brought me my wish. But one hour was needed 
for us to grow well acquainted and love each 
other. Oh how this little inner world in which 
I here live expands and widens! Johanna has 
taught her younger sisters since she was eighteen 
years old, but she feels a certain emptiness in 
the work, and that she has not yet found the 
right path in education. She joined us, to our 
great pleasure, at this afternoon tea and discus- 
sion, which little by little became very gay as 
one by one became weary of the serious debate. 
Eight o'clock found us again in the "Ritter- 
saale," not for discussion, but for a happy, 
social time. The citizens of Rudolstadt had 
provided a concert for their guests, the program 
of which was altogether too overpowering for me. 
I longed to go by myself out into the stillness of 
nature. I proposed this to Luise, and together 
we quietly left the hall with its oppressive 
atmosphere. What a pleasure it was to take 
a deep, refreshing breath! Middendorf and one 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 185 

of his young friends followed us, and after 
leaving the hall in the distance we still heard the 
closing chorus, which was given by a strong 
Mannerchor. We watched the people pour out 
from the "Ritter," but I was so weary of the 
confusion that I turned my eyes toward the dark 
hills. Moon and stars shone out through the 
white clouds. The music had already quieted 
the storm within me, and the mild night com- 
pleted the peace which fell upon me. Silently 
we walked on together. Oh beloved ones, those 
were priceless moments! 

Saturday morning promised a sultry day. We 
feared storm and rain, and the air was heavy 
and oppressive. Nevertheless the convention 
was better attended than the day before, and 
although the program was announced to begin 
at seven o'clock, an hour was spent in informal 
discussions for and against Froebel's work. 
I tried to make notes of the different points, but 
was so frequently carried away by the deep 
meaning of the speakers that I forgot all about 
my writing. I only regret that I cannot give 
you, dear parents, a complete account of the 
program, although I know that the chief points 
are written in my soul. 

Dr. K. was the first speaker: "We are 
certainly all agreed that the establishing of 
kindergartens is a necessity; and that in the 
same even children from two to six years old, of 



186 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

different classes, can be prepared to live together 
in unity; that by means of them the home 
training is completed ; that they help the home 
life, and that they provide a more uniform 
preparation for all children to later school life. 
However great and important these ideas seem, 
I did not recognize them in the demonstration 
of the kindergarten which was made for us 
yesterday. Froebel has a subjective and 
individualized personality, and his educational 
ideas emphatically reflect the same. It will 
require an entire generation to simplify kinder- 
garten practice, and set it free from its too 
emphatic symbolism. I hold that it is an injury 
to child nature to lead him too early to observing 
and discriminating the geometric forms as 
illustrated in the cube, folding paper, etc. The 
Froebel gifts, as they are supposed to be pre- 
sented to the child, suggest too strongly the 
dissecting knife method. Froebel will not 
stubbornly hold to his method of presenting the 
same if we can show him a more normal and 
natural application of his kindergarten idea, and 
if we reject all artificiality and place the same 
upon the simple platform of nature." 

Froebel made a short reply to this address, 
which was followed with closest interest. He 
proved that his educational method corrob- 
orated not only nature's lav/s, but also those of 
Christianity, and that it is, therefore, simple and 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 187 

in correspondence with the laws of development, 
which govern child nature. His words were 
clear, and were met with great favor. 

He was followed by a young schoolmaster, 
who was sent out to investigate the Froebel 
method by the Minister of Education of Dresden. 
He spoke in substance: "Froebel stands before 
us as child, man, hero, and helper, as well as 
friend and father, and with this last title, let us 
claim him. His work is like an overflowing 
fountain, out of which we have much to draw, 
but which needs clarifying. I look into Froebel's 
creative genius as into a holy chaos; myriads of 
thoughts crowd upon him, and there is no time 
for him to bring each of these into simple, 
readable form. He is, indeed, the creator of the 
kindergarten, but not its builder. His scheme 
requires modification, and his philosophy, to- 
gether with what he calls his system, are not 
clear to me. We do not need a system for the 
living together of little children. I shudder at 
such a plan, as I do before Froebel's so-called 
'Kindergarten Philosophy.' Right here may 
I ask the question, Do children in the kinder- 
garten play, or do they work?" 

Froebel arose. His face was red with anger as 
he forbade such to call him father who do not 
understand him, nor wish to understand him. 
He declared his system to be clear, and his 
philosophy simple for such as are able to rec- 



188 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

ognize the organic plan of the universe, together 
with the laws which govern the same. "The 
smallest child must be guided according to these 
laws, for he is a part of the whole. These laws 
must hold good in his earliest plays, for they are 
written within the nature of the child, and all 
his doings are symbolic of them, and my kinder- 
garten games and occupations therefore appeal 
to him. The rules of these plays and occupa- 
tions, which are indicated to the child through 
the correct guiding of the adult, prepare him for 
all actions of his later life. The child has 
intimations of these laws in his innocent aspira- 
tion; he expresses them symbolically in his 
daily activities, and therefore the kindergarten 
reinforces the institutional life which stands to 
every human being as God's law. The children 
play in the kindergarten, but these plays are 
founded on world-wide truths, and the child is 
therefore led through play out upon the true 
path of life." 

"Where shall we find women capable of 
understanding Froebel's teachings, or of apply- 
ing them? Where and how are they to be 
trained for such a work?" Some one from the 
audience asked these questions. Froebel replied : 
"When Napoleon needed able generals, he found 
them. So I will find able gardeners when once 
I am given the garden." The Dresden school- 
master who had been so frankly reproved again 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 189 

took up the word: "Froebel expects his kinder- 
gartens, which he promises will bring such 
upHfting to the human race, to be conducted by 
women, or, in other words, that his deeply 
philosophical ideas shall be made practical by 
women. I must confess that the thought of 
'philosophical' women makes me shudder." He 
continued in this manner for some time, and 
a lengthy discussion on the education of women 
followed. 

My heart-beats were almost audible, so 
indignant was I at these remarks of the men who 
evidently thought us women inferior beings! 
And are we then only here to serve the men, to 
be under their command, to have our life pro- 
gram dictated entirely by them, to be nothing of 
ourselves? To be sure there is nothing higher 
or more beautiful in life than to serve the man 
one loves and honors, but it would never occur 
to me to respect a man who considered me, as 
compared with himself, an inferior creature, for 
the great and only reason that he is a man and 
I a woman, especially if I should find him 
stupid, foolish, or unmoral, and unfortunately 
I know so many, many foolish and stupid men! 

It brought peace to my heart to think that 
Froebel and Middendorf had such a different 
opinion of women from the majority of men; 
that they honored us as worthy to fill a position 
as guardians of childhood even though unmar- 



190 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

ried; that we, as unmarried, might still work 
together with them in good sense and sincerity, 
to uplift human society; that we might be 
something or become something in and of 
ourselves. 

My impulse was to go straight to these lordly 
speakers and tell them what I here write to you, 
but I could not bring myself to speak in the 
open meeting. Who, indeed, would arise and 
defend us poor creatures? 

Johanna Kuestner arose. A deep stillness 
pervaded, while in a few clear words she asked 
that women also be treated as complete human 
beings. She added that we must be treated as 
such, and that in the future we would demand an 
altogether different education from that in the 
past, in order that we might be capable of 
carrying forward scientific and philosophical 
studies. With these words she turned to the 
speaker to whom philosophical women were 
such a horror. No conclusion was reached with 
reference to the education and position of 
women. The discussion turned again to the 
methods and means of the kindergarten occupa- 
tions, to the dangers of playful work, and other 
miscellaneous considerations of the subject of 
play. Then one speaker argued emphatically 
that there was no necessity for the founding of 
kindergartens. He held that the family was the 
only correct place for the training of children 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 191 

before they reached the school age, and that so 
far as he was concerned, it was entirely an 
unnatural development to drag little children 
out of their small circle of experience. Another 
speaker urged that the kindergarten be instituted 
only where there is an abnormal family environ- 
ment; such as where the mother is obliged to 
work outside the home for support. 

Until two o'clock the discussion swung back 
and forth. On the whole only a few voices 
were raised against the establishment of the 
kindergarten, and the chief difference of opinion 
was as to the method of introducing and carry- 
ing forward the work, and how the organization 
and introduction of same might be made with 
reference to the organized school system. At 
last a vote was taken that the kindergarten be 
universally introduced, but the "how" this 
should be done was left for the afternoon session. 

These men who spoke so emphatically against 
the method and manner of the Froebel kinder- 
garten, what did they know of the subject? For 
a few hours only they had seen children playing, 
building, weaving, and folding. How could 
they judge of the entire scheme, which, no 
doubt, would take years of study to understand ? 
This is what I frankly told the Dresden school- 
master at the close of the meeting, after Luise 
and I had had a long conversation with him. 
You can imagine how frightened I was in the 



192 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

afternoon, when this same gentleman opened 
his speech with the following words: "There 
are those among the honored ladies here who 
feel that I am incapable of passing final judg- 
ment upon Froebel's scheme, and yet I have 
been sent to this place in order to investigate, 
test, and prove this subject, and after seeing 
and hearing all that I did yesterday and to-day 
I am unable to withdraw a single word which 
I have spoken, although I am willing to confess 
that possibly the entire matter is not yet clearly 
understood by me, and, perhaps, has not yet 
been presented in its fullest light." Several 
times he made reference to the "right honorable 
ladies," and, looking our way, smiled at us. 
I was glad in the end that our impulsive words 
had made such an impression upon him. 

Nevertheless, this all-important afternoon 
witnessed a great battle between Froebel and 
his opposers. I was frightened and anxious. 
If you could have witnessed how uncle struggled 
and battled against those who wished to take 
away his kindergarten idea by consigning it to 
the place of a children's asylum! I could hardly 
contain myself. To be sure, I myself often feel 
opposed to many phases of Froebel's method, 
but does that reduce to nothing his entire 
scheme of development? It is a different 
matter to interpret Froebel's educational phi- 
losophy in various ways from condemning it 



GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 193 

altogether, and that is what these men have 
done. They are willing to have kindergartens, 
but only in a superficial way, and if possible 
they wish Froebel himself to have very little 
to do with them. But his life is as closely 
bound up with the kindergarten as are body and 
spirit, and if they insist upon making a separa- 
tion between them it would kill him. 

Up to this point Middendorf had not spoken 
a word, but the moment in which Froebel began 
to waver, he made the effort to arise, and, as he 
told me afterwards, his intention was to call 
upon the students of Froebel that they might 
testify how his teachings had brought light to 
their minds, and had given them a greater 
insight into the child's soul; that they them- 
selves had found peace and joy in their work, 
and how true happiness had been brought to the 
children. I had reached the highest point of 
excitement in this awful moment, scarcely 
knowing what to expect next, when all at once 
the debate took an entirely new direction. The 
excitement and storm which had laid hold of 
Froebel seemed suddenly to leave him, and a 
restful calm came over him as he held out his 
hand in token of peace. The manner and spirit 
in which he did this brought response from 
many hearts, and all were drawn nearer together 
at once. The closing resolution, to which the 
majority gave cordial assent, was as follows: 



194 GIRLHOOD DAYS AT KEILHAU 

"Resolved, That the state governments, as 
well as the national government, shall be urged 
to seriously consider the claims of the kinder- 
garten, and bring into use the rich educational 
material presented by Froebel, to found the 
kindergartens, and to provide for the training 
of kindergartners, and, where necessary, make 
financial provision for the same." 

After this resolution was formulated and 
accepted a thundering cheer was given "Father 
Froebel," which at the same time served as the 
closing benediction upon the exciting days at 
Rudolstadt. The doors were thrown open, the 
delegates of the assembly poured forth into the 
coolness. Later in the evening there were 
illuminations, and all enjoyed the promenade 
under the linden and chestnut trees. Songs 
were sung, and I can tell you that I relieved my 
aroused feelings by singing v/ith all my might. 
Could you only have been with me there, dear 
parents, on this triumphant, happy evening 
which followed after the days of earnest struggle ! 
Many playful remarks were exchanged between 
Froebel and his opposers, but the last toast 
sounded as follows: " Long live Froebel, woman- 
kind, and harmony." 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Autobiography of Froebel translated and annotated by 
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Friedrlch Froebel. A Biographical Sketch. M. H. 
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Froebel and Education by Self-Activity. H. Courthope 
Bowen. 

Froebel's Letters. Edited by A. H. Heineman. 

Froebel the Man and His Work. A. L. Page. 

Kindergarten and Child Culture. Henry Barnard. 

Life of Friedrich Froebel. D. J. Snider. 

Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel. Baroness von 
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Froebel in His Study. A. H. Heineman. Kindergarten 
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Froebel and Diesterwcg at Hamburg in 1850. A. H. 
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The German Froebel Union. Amalie Hofer. Kinder- 
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Frau Luise Levin Froebel. Bertha Johnston. Kinder- 
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Friedrich Froebel. A Biographical Sketch. Bertha John- 
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Diestcrweg. Maria Kraus-Boelte. Kindergarten Mag- 
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How I Came into the Froebel Service. Dr. Pappenheim. 
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Froebel Festivals in Thuringia, Germany. Eleanora 
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How Froebel Came to Hamburg. As told by Elizabeth 
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Frau Schradcr Interprets Froebel on Co-education. 
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A Study of the Original Kindergartens. Grace Owen. 
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